The School Lunch Revolution: Why What Kids Eat Changes Everything

Mark Hyman, MD

Dr. Mark Hyman is leading a health revolution—one focused on using food as medicine to support longevity, energy, mental clarity, happiness, and so much more. Mark Hyman, MD is a practicing family physician and an internationally recognized leader, speaker, educator, and advocate in the field of Functional Medicine. He is the founder and director of The UltraWellness Center, Founder and Senior Advisor for the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, a fifteen-time New York Times best-selling author, and Board President for Clinical Affairs for The Institute for Functional Medicine. He is the founder and chairman of the Food Fix Campaign, dedicated to transforming our food and agriculture system through policy.

He is a co-founder and the Chief Medical Officer of Function Health. He is the host of one of the leading health podcasts, The Dr. Hyman Show with 150+ million downloads. Dr. Hyman is a regular medical contributor to several television shows and networks, including CBS This Morning, Today, Good Morning America, The View, Fox, and CNN.

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Full Transcript

Automatically generated. Please forgive any typos or errors in the following transcript. It was generated by a third party and has not been subsequently reviewed by our team.

Dr. Mark Hyman
There was credible study by the CDC looking at nutrition in kids and found that those kids perform far better when they're well nourished. If they're not, they're basically having poor academic performance. They're having more absenteeism.

They're having more disruptive behavior. They're less likely to problem solve, less likely to pay attention. But I think this is something we just don't understand that we're doing to our kids. And it's something that's completely solvable with real food. Before we jump into today's episode, I want to share a few ways you can go deeper on your health journey.

While I wish I could work with everyone one on one, there just isn't enough time in the day. So I built several tools to help you take control of your health. If you're looking for guidance, education, and community, check out my private membership, the HymanHive, for live q and a's exclusive content and direct connection. For real time lab testing and personalized insights into your biology, visit Function Health. You can also explore my curated doctor trusted supplements and health products at doctorhymen.com.

And if you prefer to listen without any breaks, don't forget you can enjoy every episode of this podcast ad free with Hyman Plus. Just open Apple Podcasts and tap try free to start your seven day free trial. That that the junk food and the processed food and food is more expensive

Jill Shah
More expensive.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Than real food cooked from scratch by real humans locally in the kitchens.

Jill Shah
That's exactly right. And, you know, when we were going through this process, we brought in chefs, to just help us understand it. And so Ken Oringer, who is a celebrity chef in in Boston, pointed this out to us. He said, you know, the prepackaged roast beef that they're slicing up has been processed. Right?

So the whole bunch of people have touched it, manipulated it, and, you know, injected it with preservatives and salt and all kinds of other things. And and sugar, lots of sugar. That's right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Why do you put sugar in Turkey? I have no idea. Okay.

Jill Shah
No. Well, probably to hide whatever other things you're trying to hide because she cooked it so long ago. But the and so he said that, you know, that costs way more than if we just order some roast beef and have it shipped to the schools. And so as we started to do the analysis, it was true in every case. If you buy prepackaged stuff, because it's been processed, there's so much more cost in it, and then you've got margin on it as well.

So, you know, there's profit on it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Wow. So you basically decided you were gonna take this on, and, you created something called MyWay Cafe.

Jill Shah
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And and, you know, in the discovery of the the challenges, you found a whole set of solutions. Right? Because Yeah. Because the basic mantra is, look. There's only a a small amount of money that kids get for school lunch.

What what is it? $2 or something per lunch?

Jill Shah
Yeah. It's yeah. It's a little more than that. $3.45.

Dr. Mark Hyman
$3.45.

Jill Shah
But but 20¢ of it is milk.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Okay. 20 which by

Sam Kass
the way,

Kimbal Musk
we didn't talk

Dr. Mark Hyman
about this.

Jill Shah
Yeah. But skim skim or flavored?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Like okay. Right? Another topic. We'll get to it in a because I could go on for hours about that. But but you you you you hear the mantra, look.

This is the best we can do. We can't serve kids delicious real whole food because it's too expensive. It's too difficult. It's not possible. And you actually figured out that not only possible, but it's not that hard and it's totally scalable.

So tell us about that process.

Jill Shah
Yeah. Well, it was fun to do it on paper. Right? So if you pull out spreadsheets and you start to, you know, put in all the food costs and all the labor costs and all the transportation costs, you can show very easily in a model that you can take the same subsidy from the USDA, employ three times as many people, serve all real whole food. And the only single time investment you need to make, we did it philanthropically, and then the city has now taken it over, is to build these micro kitchens.

And they're not even I mean, they have they have a combination oven, and they have the right number of sinks. They have prep tables, and they have a freezer and fridge in them. So they're not nothing out of this world, but it's exactly the amount of equipment. We have rice cookers as well, for people to prepare a full buffet of hot and cold food every day for kids. Looks like a rainbow.

Kids love it. It smells good. It doesn't smell like heated plastic in schools anymore. It smells like real food. And so but that process took a long time.

That process took about nine months of us pushing really hard. And, is that a cat?

Sam Kass
Yeah. It's my cat.

Kimbal Musk
It's so cute.

Jill Shah
I love it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
He's my work companion. Have many other people to hang around with anymore than my wife. So You

Jill Shah
have the cat. So we have the cats too. So we so so, you know, we tripped over. It was like one thing at a time, every hurdle. And you you can imagine why government alone can't do this because there are so many nos that get in the way.

And so we just kind of every time someone said no, we said, why not? And we would just solve the problem. And then we get to the next thing. You know, like the one of the earliest problems we solved was everything was coming in wrapped. So apples were wrapped in plastic, oranges were wrapped in plastic.

It just made it just made it look so unappetizing.

Sam Kass
Wow.

Jill Shah
And so the why so the answer to the why why do we have to do it this way was, well, you don't have fruit washing sinks in the in the kitchens. So we said if we put a fruit washing sink in the kitchen, do we have to wrap the fruit anymore? They said, no. You just gotta wash the fruit. So it was just super simple, not expensive solution to a really big problem.

Kids weren't eating the fruit because it took five minutes to unwrap the bloody thing and it didn't look appetizing anyway. So we just had to do that with everything. And we and we got

Dr. Mark Hyman
rid of Instead of saying instead of people saying, you know, this is why not and just stopping there, you were like, well, how how do we fix this?

Jill Shah
Yeah. Exactly.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It wasn't that hard. Right? It's a sink. It's it's other simple things. And I think, you know, what was interesting, you showed me once, it was a little subversive because you sort of started this program in the school.

You did it in one school. You showed it could be done. Yeah. You got them to not ship in the food from out of state all wrapped in plastic, and you didn't really tell anybody what you were doing. And by the time people caught on, it was sort of too late.

Yeah. Know, these these big food service providers that were, you know, cashing in all the government supports and making crappy food

Jill Shah
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Were out of business.

Jill Shah
Right. That's right. You know? So it was it was interesting because the one thing that we caught wind up is that the food provider, so the vendor that provided all the plastic wrapped food, that opportunity was up for bid. And we happened to just walk in the door as that bidding process was being set up.

And so the only recommendation we made, because we didn't wanna have anything to do with plastic wrapped food, is we said, make sure that you have the right to pull out any school. If for any reason you would wanna shift the way you were feeding kids. So they wrote that into the bid, and and the deal was done with that in mind. And we knew already, like, if this thing works, then we're just gonna be able to, you know, pull off. So and and that's what's happened.

30 schools a year have come off of that contract and have gone on to this, you know, fully managed by the Boston Public Schools real whole food.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So who made those decisions about the contracts? Was it the school superintendents? Was it

Jill Shah
The head of food services. The head food services. Yeah. Who came from LA. She had you know, she was trying to do a lot of things in LA in terms of shifting the food also in what they were serving there.

So she was This all seemed very risky to her and we kept saying to her, we're here to carry the risk on this. We'll make sure that we don't break anything. And but, you know, it was her decision to put the language into the contract, and she really kind of made sure that we could keep pushing forward. It was because it was complicated.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It it it is. You know, I think right now we're hearing a lot of mantras about school lunch. Oh, you know, we put in these nutrition guidelines that are better under the hunger free kids act that Obama passed in 2010, which improved

Jill Shah
Yes.

Dr. Mark Hyman
The what to eat more whole foods, more vegetables, etcetera, etcetera. Although they still passed potatoes, I mean, quote, french fries as a vegetable and ketchup and pizza as vegetables, which, you know, just still is is hard to imagine. But but now what's happening is these these guidelines are being rolled back because they're saying that kids won't eat the healthy food. They throw it in the garbage. It tastes bad.

It costs too much. And so they're they're rolling back these these guidelines. And and yet your your model shows that that's just a bunch of nonsense.

Jill Shah
Yeah. Yeah. We you know, it's interesting. I I think the one thing we did in terms of a service model, which I think changes the way kids behave around food, we we it's all child driven. So we the protein is separate from the grains, separate from the warm vegetables, is separate from all the cold, fruits and vegetables, is separate from the beans, etcetera.

And so nothing has to touch anything else, which is a big reason that kids don't like certain things. So if I if I walk down the line, right, I might take protein. I might take chicken, and I might forgo the rice because I don't like it, but maybe there's a roll that I want. And, I like the roasted broccoli, or I don't like any of the hot vegetables, so maybe but I do want an apple and I want some celery and I want a carrot, but I definitely don't want a salad and I do not want dressing, but I do want the hot sauce. So kids make their own meals, and and this is not slow.

This happens. There are there are servers on the other side. This is all within the $3.45 who are talking with kids. Kids are saying please and thank you. There's a whole conversation that's going on that wasn't happening before, and they're getting exactly what they want.

They walk up the line pretty gleefully, actually.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And eat it.

Jill Shah
They eat it all because they asked for it. That's what

Kimbal Musk
they wanted. Waste.

Jill Shah
There's no food waste. There's no food waste. And then, you know, and then we really insert opportunities for kids to try things. Right? So while they're sitting around, they're sitting at the table eating, we might say, these are chickpeas.

Would you like to try chickpeas? Right? So they we introduce new foods, tofu. Tofu is like kids love tofu out. Love it.

You know? And so it's it's just so hard to hear the argument that kids won't eat the food. I think the adults don't know how to present the food to the kids.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So so just to recap, the the the economics work. You can create better food, more locally sourced, made from scratch. All you need is a little bit of an improvement in the kitchens.

Jill Shah
Yep.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You hire more people.

Jill Shah
Yep.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Which still was is within the cost structure.

Jill Shah
Totally.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Who are happier with their jobs because they're actually cooking and making kids happy. Yeah. And the kids are happy. They're not throwing out the food.

Jill Shah
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And and how's their health and academic performance? Have you tracked that?

Jill Shah
It's interesting. So we are doing, there's a study being done right now on the behavioral health because we were hearing from so many principals and teachers that negative behavioral events had gone way down in the schools. And so kids were just being disciplined less and teachers and principals thought it was because of the of the school food, the new school food. We don't have data yet. We're we are gonna start doing some research on their physical health as well, but I can tell you one story that I tell all the time.

There was a child who was diagnosed with failure to thrive. And part of the school's responsibility was to try to get a half a can of a protein drink into this child every day. His name was George. And I walked in about three days after the MyWayCAPE program had started in his school, and the principal was kind of teary eyed. And she said, I I gotta tell you.

She said, this boy, George, told me his situation. She said, he's eating every meal.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Wow.

Jill Shah
And so I I ended up meeting George a week later. And he said, you know, do you know the people who make the food? And I said, oh, I do. Yeah. And he said, how how do you how does someone make a recipe?

I said, well, it's kinda like coloring. You know? If you take a red crayon and a blue crayon and you put them together, it's purple. So that's what they do. You know?

And he's like, oh. And he's like, you know, he's like, I'm pretty sure that I wanna be a chef. Like, this is a kid who, a couple of weeks ago, his his pediatrician came in to see what was happening. His mom wanted to be able to bring the food home so he would eat at night. I mean, this is like a game changer.

And as far as I can tell, it was his relationship when they're with one of these newly hired cafeteria service workers who just changed his mind about eating. It it was mind blowing. It still is. So it's yeah. No.

When you search for your kid.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. And then, you know, the the maybe you haven't collected the data yet, but I think it's gonna show remarkable things. You know? When you look at

Jill Shah
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Kids in schools and violent disruptive behavior, it's a big issue. I mean, kids one in ten kids are on ADD medication. You know, we have to have special ed. There's it's just it's a it's an enormous problem in school. School nurses are dishing out medications left and right kids.

And, you know, we know from the studies that, you know, these are these are difficult kids. There's a 3,000, kid study, which were incarcerated youth. And they were basically replaced junk food with healthier options and got rid of sugar and refined foods. And in twelve months, there was a 21% reduction in antisocial behavior, a 25% reduction in assaults, a 75% reduction in user restraints. And get this, Jill, there was a 100% reduction in suicides, which is basically when you think about it, suicide is the third leading cause of death in children aged 10 to 19.

And and when you look at the CDC study, there was incredible study by the CDC looking at nutrition in kids and found that those kids perform far better when they're when they're well nourished. If they're not, they're basically having poor academic performance. They're having more absenteeism. They're having more disruptive behavior. They're less likely to problem solve, less likely to pay attention.

But I think this is something we just don't understand that we're we're doing to our kids, and it's something that's completely solvable with real food. I mean, the CDC published this in a report in 2014 called health and academic achievement, and it was just such a clear link between poor nutrition and poor academic performance with lower test scores, lower grades, poor cognitive function, less alertness, less attention, poor memory. And it was just amazing. And so we have the ability to change this. We just don't do it.

And I think the science is there. And now what you've shown is that the possibility of scaling this is there. Two out of ten kids now are obese, not just overweight. Four out of ten are overweight. We're seeing this affect their cognitive behavior and academic performance.

What's most striking in the studies that really shocked me was that the ones the kids who were the most obese are also the most nutrient deficient. When you look at their vitamin and mineral levels, they are among the lowest because they're eating crap. Yeah. And it's affecting their cognitive function, their metabolism, and setting them up for really bad bad outcomes in lives, lower life expectancy, lower ability to earn higher incomes. And in schools, it's it's a cesspool there.

Sugar, salt, processed carbs, industrial refined fats, and then they look I mean, I I went to the school. They had, you know, McDonald's Monday, Taco Bell Tuesday, Wendy's Wednesday. They had advertising all over the gymnasiums and bathroom stalls.

Kimbal Musk
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And and you guys really went to work on this with the hunger free kids act, the healthy hunger free kids act, which was signed into law in 2010. Can you tell us about that? And what were the challenges you found that you faced in addressing changes to the school lunch program from the food industry and from the congress? And, you know, what was

Sam Kass
that like? There are lots of them. You know? So when we got there, there was no rules at all about what you could sell in schools. So in vending machines and in the a la carte lines and and the lunch rooms, there was literally zero standards.

You could sell anything you wanted. And the the guidelines hadn't hadn't been updated in terms of the new standards for the school lunch meal itself. In twenty years, they have been new resource for the program in thirty. Wow. And, you know, part of the challenge there's lots of different challenges.

One, we were trying to do it in the middle of economic collapse, not too, you know, different from what's happening right now. He's probably that

Dr. Mark Hyman
was in 2008.

Sam Kass
Right? Yeah. And so, you know, it was in we were working on this in '2 you know, through 2009. So, you know, pretty pretty intense time to try to get a bill like that done. But, you know, for us and the administration, and it by the way, it took president Obama intervening and push helping to push with with the first lady to get that done, you know, as we think it was the bedrock of the future of the nation, and so that's why it was such a priority for us.

You know, I think there's a lot of challenges. One, like, on the vending machines, you know, they are huge sources of revenue for things that we care about in schools, like art class and music class, the school's budget Sports. Yeah. For sports. So these budgets have been cut so much that schools are depending on basically selling these kids junk food to keep programs that we all care about alive.

So there's a real, you know, tense conflict there. But, you know, obviously, you know, killing them or prematurely over the long Cut. Like, not a solution for art. So They

Dr. Mark Hyman
can they can write great poems as they're dying and great songs as. Dying. So we're like, this is a work

Sam Kass
we had to work this out. You know, there's huge raging and sometimes, you know, the debates in Washington just, you know, make leave you scratching your head, but huge debates on whether you had to just offer the vegetable to the kid or actually had to serve them. Well, they're

Dr. Mark Hyman
talking about competitive foods in schools, which makes me crazy. I mean, if you a competitive food is a doughnut versus an apple. So if you put them side by side, guess which one the kid's gonna pick. Yeah. So It's not exactly competitive.

Sam Kass
Big big big fights there. And, you know, then there was a pretty infamous effort by the frozen food institute, which is basically the pizza and french fries Yeah. Cool. That got that made the the tomato sauce on the pizza to be counted as a vegetable. Yep.

And french fries, we were working very hard to put limit. We were we proposed limitations on the amount of fries that could be served in a given week.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Which was also vegetable. Right. Exactly. You you didn't know?

Sam Kass
And the

Dr. Mark Hyman
Ketchup also is a vegetable.

Sam Kass
Yep. Yeah. And so con they got congress to intervene, and they they they let they attached that onto another bill and got that through. So we were able to then increase the serving of vegetables. So you could serve fries, but you still also had to serve, like, broccoli or something like that.

So it really kind of defeated the purpose of serving the fries. So Yeah. We were able to constrain that significantly at the time anyway. And so I mean, I remember

Dr. Mark Hyman
a story that, you know, Swanson's Pizza, which is is a big pizza company in Minnesota, is the largest supplier of pizza to schools. Yeah. They And and Amy Klobuchar, who's the senator from Minnesota, a Democrat, was instrumental in getting Yeah. Pizza being included as a vegetable, which just goes to show you the ways in which the food industry is so influential in driving our policies, which have nothing to do with science. Yep.

That is true. We had big fights on potatoes in many arenas Mhmm.

Sam Kass
Similar to school life as well as with WIC. You know? So but I gotta say, like, so there was real fights. I do think there's this, like, I have gotten over the outrage that industry is gonna pursue their interests. I'm sort of just like, gotta get over it and just win and just beat them at their at this game, and we need to be smarter and more strategic and get in power run for office, get in power, and win.

So you think

Dr. Mark Hyman
that the congressmen and senators would be your allies. Did you find that? I mean, clearly, food industry put Yes. Back

Sam Kass
Sometimes they well, we got it all passed, and the bill was actually quite good outside of those things I mentioned. You know? The whole grain provision, the sodium provisions, the amount of vegetables we had to serve, like, all those things were actually quite very, very strong. There was enough money for the program. Could it be improved?

Of course. Could it be significantly improved? Absolutely. But was it just a transformational bill compared to what was there before? Absolutely.

So you know? And it took a herculean effort to get it done at given everything else that was going on in Washington. So so, you know, look. I mean, I that was just a huge win. And And did was there

Dr. Mark Hyman
was there any follow-up data on how kids did in terms of their weight, their academic performance, the the impact of the new school lunch guidelines? The the

Sam Kass
I haven't seen a robust analysis for the whole program in its entirety. The other part of the bill that we buried and didn't really talk much about because we didn't get it yet, but maybe the most impactful thing in this bill, I don't know when you could debate it, was was provision that basically said that it's called the community eligibility program, and it allowed schools that had 40 free or reduced, basically, where the majority almost the majority of their kids were low income kids. You could serve breakfast to every kid in the school for free, and every kid got lunch for free. So Amazing. It was what was what's very powerful about that is not as much at lunch but at breakfast because at lunch, everybody's eating together, and you don't know who's who.

But breakfast was only in the cafeteria for the poor kids. And so what would happen is those kids would have lunch at school. They'd go home. Most of them don't get food at home when they get there. Maybe a little bag of chips or something.

And then they come back to school, but they were so ashamed of being identified as poor that they would skip breakfast even though they hadn't eaten since lunch the day. Wow. And so by serving it in the in the in breakfast in the classroom and serving it to everybody, all, like, millions of poor kids are getting food that otherwise wouldn't. And so you saw there increased participation, better improved significantly improved attendance, and significantly improved reading and math scores because, you know, those kids you know? Can you remember when you were, like, 12 or 13, how hungry you were all the time?

Yeah. And imagine you hadn't eaten since, you know, lunch, and it's now 09:00. Been lunch the day before, and it's now 09:00. And you're asked to, like, focus Focus. Fast.

Yeah. Forget it. Forget that. I could barely do that if I was full, let alone if I was younger. Right?

And so, you know, so it was a transformational piece of of legislation in that regard. And for the district, they've seen just incredible results. There's been challenges to implement it, but those resources remain, and more and more districts each year are signing up for it. And so that, you know, I I think I think we have to be careful. Like, things are messy, and politics is messy, and you're gonna have people lobbying for their for their own interest of their businesses, sometimes in ways that, you know, I can understand, sometimes that I find disgusting and just abhorrent.

You sure there's

Dr. Mark Hyman
a way stories of what you experience that, you know, kind of reveal the underbelly of what what you're fighting against?

Sam Kass
I mean, look. It cut both ways. I mean, I think, you know, when we were we banned trans fats, which, you know, there was an attempt to try to figure out from the industry side if, you know, they could still because of a few people who wanted various icy and other couple products where, you know, it was harder to replace. They wanted to, like, go fight to try to allow a certain level Right. In under the ban.

Am I allowed to swear to this podcast? You can. I mean and I told the lobby that it had lobbyists with guys. Like, if you wanna have that fucking fight, like, let's go because I cannot wait to take it to you on this. If you wanna make sure that you're pumping trans fats, that is a known killer.

Like, let's go at it. So, you know, there's people like that's, like, clearly something that was killing everybody, a very specific thing that would have ample evidence. And sometimes, you just look like ready for a nasty fight. But I will also say, and it's important for everybody to understand, there's a lot of nuance and a lot of gray. So there's some issues like pizza in you know, as a vegetable or trans fat, which is a black and white issue.

But there's a lot of other companies that, you know, have done tremendous work to try to make it easier and more affordable for families to get decent food that are working with real constraints from Wall Street. You know? Like, if

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Sam Kass
CEOs try to change too much too fast and lose some revenue in a three or six month period, they're going get fired. Right? So those efforts are, you know, would be undone in a minute. So if you're trying to get something to change, there's a pragmatism that has to be taken from them And as by the way, a lot of people talk about wanting to eat better and how we need better food, but consumers, you know, tend to eat what they eat and tend to like pretty unhealthy food. And That's because

Dr. Mark Hyman
that food likes them. It's addictive, and it sort of sets up the biology of That's hunger and craving and addiction, which is very hard to fight with willpower, and that's part of the problem.

Sam Kass
I told that that's absolutely right, but it's also a real problem for the industry. So they've created they boxed themselves into a problem of creating, you know, highly craveable food, and now it's they're it's people want it, and they like it, and they identify themselves with eating it. So it becomes the whole you know, what we eat is really how we understand who we are. Yeah. And so when you start to change, you're saying you wanna change me as a human, And so it gets super complicated, and people aren't changing as fast as we think they are.

And so for some for a CEO who's like, I get it. Like, my portfolio is not good. I'm shit gotta make the real change. It's not like they're in the position to say, I get these products are terrible. I'm just gonna get rid of them.

Like

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Well, they're innovating. These companies are innovating. They're getting the crap out. They're reformulating their products.

Sam Kass
They're getting there. They're getting I just I just think we have to be careful to see, like, the monolith evil food industry

Dr. Mark Hyman
I

Sam Kass
agree. Versus everybody because it just actually doesn't capture the reality nor is it gonna go away. And so I think we have to work to figure out who's a good actor trying to do the right thing, who's not, and just needs to get called out and pressured and fought and won, and and then work strategically to make progress where you know, to work collaboratively when you can and fight when you have to.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's hard it's hard to have the sniff detestor on for the greenwashing, you know, what what's true, what's not. And, you know, a lot of people are saying the right things. Are they doing the right things? You know, one of the things that's challenging, all the hard work you did with the Obamas to get the healthy, hunger free kids act passed in 2010.

Sam Kass
Yep.

Dr. Mark Hyman
The current administration is trying to roll that back. And their their arguments are that, oh, kids are throwing out the food. It doesn't taste good. People won't eat it. You know?

So we have to fix those guidelines, quote, fix the guidelines and which means roll them back so that more junk can be in the schools. Yep. And and I I think, you know, there's a real challenge in the culinary world in school lunches. And as a chef, I'd love your opinion about this because like we're talking about before, you've learned how to make delicious yummy meals in a short order from ingredients that aren't gonna break the bank, and that and that can be done. And I think there there are models of this.

You know, my friend Jill Shaw, I think I might have touched about her Yeah. Was also gonna be on the podcast talking about MyWay Cafe where she got top chefs to create delicious meals within the school nutrition guidelines within the school budget for school lunches, which is not very much. And kids love it, and they're not throwing it out, they're eating it. And I I've seen this happen over and over throughout the country. So can you speak to the rollbacks that are happening, why they're happening, and and what we can do to fight those?

Yeah. Well, the main

Sam Kass
reason they're happening is because of the school nutrition association. And that is an organization whose name they does not deserve.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Could be the school malnutrition association? Yes.

Sam Kass
Basically. So, basically, what's happened with them is, you know, they represent the school chefs, as I call them, and, you know, they've been under a lot of pressure for for many years. And, you know, I will say that school chefs around this country have, for the most part, they go into these cafeterias with very little resource, with almost no support. They love those kids, and they're really trying to do right by them. Yeah.

Unfortunately, the the organization that represents them is one that is just dominated by some of the worst players in in the food system, the those same pizza and french fries guys, Conagra, and and a few others are the most influential companies on their board, and they were very supportive of of the of Healthy, Younger, Free Kids Act and the work that we were doing, and we were real allies of theirs. And then they realized that this was standards were going too far. And kind of in the middle of the whole thing, they fired the the CEO, brought in a bunch of hacks for big food, and have then since started fighting us, and and now have been lobbying the the Trump administration to roll back the standards. So if they're listening, I haven't been talking to you guys in a while, but shame, shame on you. It's just an abomination of your role in our society to be safeguarding the well-being of the kids that are eating in in our schools and representing and supporting the the people, and mostly women, who are working so hard with so little support day in and day out to to do the best they can with these resources.

And I just am so disappointed in how that has played out. You know, the argument that it's just good enough to have some green beans on the line, that that's like a serious argument for a 10 year old to say they want it. It's just a joke. The reality is all the evidence shows that the evidence shows two things. One, people kids have been throwing out school lunch since the day it was invented.

And that is nothing new, and there's zero evidence that our new standards led to any increased food food waste. Secondly, the evidence shows that there's a substantial increase in consumption if you actually serve the food to the child.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You mute it on their plate.

Sam Kass
If it's on their plate, they're more likely to eat it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
What do you know?

Sam Kass
Actually, we had to research that, but it's true. It turns out that's the that's how it goes.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And our curriculums have been disrupted so that there is no longer HOMEC. It was an intentional initiative by the food industry to remove home ec from schools, and it was successful.

Kimbal Musk
That is so sad.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And we have changed now raised generations of Americans who don't know how to cook. So you're trying to change all that. And what's what's interesting is that a lot of people are talking about school gardens and helping with school lunches and all that's great. But at the end of the day, you have to retrain kids to learn about food, nutrition. And you've done it not just with the gardens but integrating the gardens into the curriculum.

So can you talk about how that works and why Big Green is such an

Kimbal Musk
important Big Green has become my proudest achievement and I am so happy and the team that we have at Big Green, what we've done.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So PayPal was kind of a footnote?

Kimbal Musk
Yeah, exactly. In the old days. You know, I think what I found when we opened the kitchen in 2004, we took some of the profits and we supported school gardens in the community. One of our first employees wanted to do that and we thought that would be a nice way to give back. And every year with a lot of financial support from us and others, this person was able to open two new school gardens a year.

And I had a very serious accident in 2010. And so between 2004 and 2010, I was getting really frustrated that we couldn't reach that many more kids. It was very effective. You get a school garden into a school, food literacy goes up, access to food increases, the choice of fruits and vegetables goes up, scores go up. I mean if you do the same science lesson in fifth grade in a school garden versus in the class, scores go up by 15 points on a 100

Dr. Mark Hyman
scale. Is it because they're eating that food or because

Kimbal Musk
No, you're one, that experiential, having fun, exactly. Imagine learning out of a textbook versus being in a garden. You're just gonna remember and learn that better. So it did work but it just didn't scale and I got really frustrated. And I, I had a, in 2010, had a very serious accident.

I went down a ski hill on an inner tube, one of those sanctioned children's runs. It wasn't wasn't, an illegal thing.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Saw the age limit. You're not exactly. I not over

Kimbal Musk
10 years old. It should have been a height limit. I'm six four. Weirdly, I'm six five now because of the surgery. But

Dr. Mark Hyman
No, that's an indictment.

Kimbal Musk
People are going

Dr. Mark Hyman
to be writing in, How do I get the height extension surgery?

Kimbal Musk
You break

Sam Kass
your neck. And

Kimbal Musk
so I went down the ski hill, the tube flipped. It was meant for a kid, so I'm six'five and it just really wasn't meant from someone of my size. It threw me, landed on my head going 35 miles an hour, broke my spine at C6 and C7, ruptured the spinal column, paralyzed for three days. And if it means it's just impossible to describe the lack of feeling. With paralysis, there's no pain.

There's just nothing.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Like the void.

Kimbal Musk
It's just you watch your body and you just can't move it. You'd send the signal to your left hand to go move and it just doesn't move. You just can't believe it. You just cannot process it. The doctors actually were telling me that the way I broke my spine, my neck was they could fix it.

There was bleeding in the spinal column, so that was causing the paralysis. But if they can get in and fix it fast enough, I'd get feeling back and hopefully motion and so forth. But I remember them telling me this and I was paralyzed and I'm thinking to myself, oh no, okay, it's gonna be fine, it's gonna be fine. And there were just tears streaming down the side of my face. I just had no ability to process what was going on.

It was just absolutely awful. Three days later, the surgery was successful, but I also had to be horizontal for two months in as part of the therapy. I think so while I was in hospital while I was paralyzed and they were telling me they could fix me I said to myself that if I did they did fix me I would figure out food and how to scale real food, bring real food to everyone.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Why? Because the hospital food was so bad?

Kimbal Musk
Well, partly because I had been working in food, I couldn't scale I had this block in my head that you can't scale school gardens, you can't scale restaurants. That's that's more precious.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You never heard of McDonald's?

Kimbal Musk
Yeah, you know, that's the weird thing. It's obviously scalable. But but I had I had this block in my head. And and when I when I had this accident, and I was sitting in hospital hospital, I said to myself, you know, I'm going to give this a try, I'm going to focus entirely on food. It was a restart in my life.

When you break your neck, you get permission from everyone to do anything at all. My joke about it is if not for the physical trauma, I highly recommend the psychological awakening. Because what I got out of that was permission to be myself. Myself was with

Dr. Mark Hyman
You came right up against your mortality.

Kimbal Musk
Exactly. And you look back on your life and you say to yourself that, I told myself that I have this capacity to do good things and I'm good at building businesses, I'm good at leading people. And I had done my restaurant and I'd done a little bit of work in school gardens, but most of my effort was in the technology space, which really just did not get me going.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Didn't hit your soul.

Kimbal Musk
Yeah. And many other people are even better at it than me, know, and good for them and they should do it. But for me, what I'm uniquely gifted at is I love food. I love cooking for people. And I'm good at building businesses.

And so I just gave myself permission to combine my purpose and my passion and it's just been amazing.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, that's such an incredible story. Know, I went through a similar crisis that changed the course of my life, which was I got very ill like twenty five years ago and having to figure out how to get better led me to sort of want to tell the world about a new way of thinking about medicine and the body. But it was really about systems thinking and it's about ecosystems and that's what's led me to think about farming and all the things that we're talking about today because they're all connected. We don't fix these problems, we're not going to fix our health, we're not going to fix our economy.

Kimbal Musk
Well I've to give you a shout out. One of my team members, his name's Kevin, his daughter struggled with asthma for years. Yeah. Chronic asthma. And we'd go to the doctor, they'd give her medications and never worked.

And he read your book, Eating to Beat Disease.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That was William Lee.

Kimbal Musk
Sorry, that's William Lee's book. Yours is What the Heck Yes, Should I

Dr. Mark Hyman
Food, What the Heck Should I Eat.

Kimbal Musk
Sorry about that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
William Lee is good.

Kimbal Musk
Well, love William Lee. Sorry. But he read your book and changed the way his daughter ate. And not only did she prove she's a healthier kid right now, but he actually went to her doctor and took your book in and the doctor said that your book was the best approach to eating that she as a doctor had seen and is now prescribing that book to her patients. Amazing.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's not based on ideology, it's really honest. It's like here's what we know, here's what we don't know, here's what we're sort of learning, and here's how to eat that's better for you and the planet. And it's sort of pretty simple and

Kimbal Musk
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Brings common sense.

Kimbal Musk
Me. I'm just a shout

Dr. Mark Hyman
out for you. Thank you. That I really appreciate it. That

Kimbal Musk
I know, like, old I I interact with every day.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's amazing. So so you you wanna get this school curriculum out there to not just thousands, but millions.

Kimbal Musk
We're at 350,000 kids every school day. We're six fifty schools. We combine the curriculum of science, what kids learn in science in the classroom. We bring it into the garden and they actually learn their science lessons in the garden so that the teachers don't have to do extra work. They just go outside to teach the same lesson.

It's one of the maybe right or wrong thing to do, but we actually know what paragraph of what textbook is being taught at what hour of the day in every district. So we can I mean, it's just because that's how teachers are trained to focus It's amazing how structured it is? Unfortunately, wish teachers had a bit more freedom. But as a result, we can say, oh, we know that you're going to teach. But we do plant a seed down the first day of spring.

March 19, this coming year, we get teachers across the country to pledge to plant a seed with their kids. But what we do is we know the paragraph in the science textbook they have to teach on that day. And so we can say here's the lesson. So let's all go teach together. And in the classroom if you're in the northern climates and outdoors if you're in the southern climates and you'll plant a seed with your kids.

And our goal of this coming Plant a Seed Day is to get every teacher in America to pledge to plant a seed with their kids.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So you're teaching also them cooking, you're teaching them about food, you're teaching about nutrition, you're

Kimbal Musk
teaching Well anytime the food comes out of the garden, you deal with kitchens in schools which are not very sophisticated. They're really

Dr. Mark Hyman
Deep fryers and microwaves mostly.

Kimbal Musk
Yeah, basically warming ovens. And so there are things that you can do really well. So if you give kale from the garden to a kitchen worker, they can put the kale in an oven, warming oven, and bake it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Make kale chips.

Kimbal Musk
Yeah. And it's absolutely delicious. A little bit of drizzle of olive oil, little touch of salt and you put it in these warming ovens. And so that's a very popular ingredient that's cooked from our learning gardens that is absolutely delicious. Anyone at home, go with some kale, make sure there's no water on it, put it in the oven, three fifty degrees for about thirty minutes, little salt and olive oil, and you'll have kale strips, which is like french fries.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Sort of like your chicken.

Kimbal Musk
With all the nutrition you can imagine.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Sort of like your magic one hour chicken.

Kimbal Musk
Yes, exactly. Exactly. Cooking is not that hard.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's really true. So you've been thinking long and hard about the food space and you've been acting in these sectors, farming, school gardens and learning and restaurants. As someone who's really deep in this, looking at our global food system, looking at our food policies, what really needs to change and how are you sort of working in the advocacy space, or are you?

Kimbal Musk
You know, I did work I toured the congress congressional halls with Tom Colicchio, who's so passionate around policy. And he does great things in that area and I respect it. It's just not good. It's not like I didn't find it good for me. Doesn't ring your bell.

Yeah, for me I'd rather

Dr. Mark Hyman
You don't like hanging out with politicians who don't get anything done?

Kimbal Musk
No, exactly. Oh my God. It's so against my DNA. It's just crazy. So I support Tom and I do everything I can to help him succeed.

And there's another group called the National Young Farmers Coalition, which lobbyist is for young farmers, which of course the young farmers don't pay them anything. It's a nonprofit that people who care about farming support like myself and few other folks. But those folks understand Capitol Hill, they understand the patience that's required and I trust them to legislation forward. But they need more help. They need as much of us as possible to help them either with political support where we actually go to the Congressional Hill and support folks like Tom and National Young Farmers, but also financial support.

If there's a nonprofit out there you guys want to support, it's called the National Young Farmers Coalition. How those And guys are really working hard to figure out how to get young people into farming, give them access to land. If they don't know about square roots, they'll let young farmers know about square roots if they happen to live in one of the cities we're working in. But it's about getting those young farmers engaged, which is going to be both political support, which I support others to do because I don't have that DNA and then actual entrepreneurial support of figuring out how to create businesses that work for young farmers.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well it's true, there's so much innovation in this space in food and ag.

Kimbal Musk
It's a very exciting time actually.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's really one of the fastest growing sectors of innovation and funding from venture capitalists and I mean it's just striking and you know it's sort of bypassing the government in a way which is actually what's needed.

Kimbal Musk
I mean I grew up in South Africa where I grew up during the apartheid era. I was in protests, anti apartheid protests, you know, my teen years. I grew up with such a skepticism of government's role. Just how bad it could be, frankly. And in America, I'm not suggesting government shouldn't play a part, they should do their part, but I don't come at it from a perspective of the government's going solve our problems.

I come at it from the perspective that we're going to probably solve it despite the government. And unfortunately I think in the food world that is becoming the case.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You know it's interesting, we're at this conference where we met called Food Tank and Sam Kass who worked with the Obamas on their food policy and nutrition standards, he said we don't have a food movement. Now many people sort of disputed that who were in the audience, but I think what he meant was we don't really have an organized force that's lobbying and creating coordinated policy and strategy.

Kimbal Musk
There is that group, the National Young Farmers Coalition. Think But right, though. Think for the most part, the only lobbyists out there are the ones protecting the entrenched corn and soybean industry, the ethanol industry. And those are the wrong people to succeed. Unfortunately, because there's no one to be a counterbalance, we do struggle on Capitol Hill.

That being said, Tom Colico got up right after that and said, Hey, wait a minute, let's give ourselves some credit.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's wonderful programs that have

Kimbal Musk
been successful because of the food movement Washington, D. C. So I think it's good for the provocative talk, but I actually do think that there is some success happening and we should be proud of our achievements. Just the beginning though and we have a lot of work to do.

Dr. Mark Hyman
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