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The Leading Voices in Food

The Leading Voices in Food

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 The Leading Voices in Food podcast series features real people, scientists, farmers, policy experts and world leaders all working to improve our food system and food policy. You'll learn about issues across the food system spectrum such as food insecurity, obesity, agriculture, access and equity, food safety, food defense, and food policy. Produced by the Duke World Food Policy Center at wfpc.sanford.duke.edu.Duke World Food Policy Center Ciências Ciências Sociais Higiene e Vida Saudável
Episódios
  • E278: Here's how screen time affects our kids' eating, activity, and mental health

    E278: Here's how screen time affects our kids' eating, activity, and mental health
    Jul 15 2025
    Interview Summary So, you two, along with a number of other people in the field, wrote a chapter for a recently published book called The Handbook of Children and Screens. We discussed that book in an earlier podcast with its editors, Dmitri Christakis and Kris Perry, the executive director of the Children and Screens organization. And I'd like to emphasize to our listeners that the book can be downloaded at no cost. I'd like to read a quote if I may, from the chapter that the two of you wrote. 'Screen time continues to evolve with the advent of continuous and immersive video reels, voice activated assistance, social media influencers, augmented and virtual reality targeted advertising. Immersive worlds where children can virtually shop for food and beverages, cook or work in a fast-food outlet from a smartphone, a tablet, a computer, or an internet connected tv and more.' So as much as I follow the field, I still read that and I say, holy you know what. I mean that's just an absolutely alarming set of things that are coming at our children. And it really sounds like a tidal wave of digital sophistication that one could have never imagined even a short time ago. Amanda, let's start with you. Can you tell us a little bit more about these methods and how quickly they evolve and how much exposure children have? I think you're right, Kelly, that the world is changing fast. I've been looking at screen media for about 20 years now as a researcher. And in the earlier years, and Tom can attest to this as well, it was all about TV viewing. And you could ask parents how much time does your child spend watching TV? And they could say, well, they watch a couple shows every night and maybe a movie or two on the weekend, and they could come up with a pretty good estimate, 1, 2, 3 hours a day. Now, when we ask parents how much time their children spend with media, they have to stop and think, 'well, they're watching YouTube clips throughout the day. They're on their smartphone, their tablet, they're on social media, texting and playing all these different games.' It really becomes challenging to even get a grasp of the quantity of screen time let alone what kids are doing when they're using those screens. I will say for this book chapter, we found a really great review that summarized over 130 studies and found that kids are spending about three and a half or four hours a day using screens. Yet some of these studies are showing as high as seven or eight hours. I think it's probably under-reported because parents have a hard time really grasping how much time kids spend on screens. I've got a one-year-old and a five-year-old, and I've got some nieces and nephews and I'm constantly looking over their shoulder trying to figure out what games are they playing and where are they going online and what are they doing. Because this is changing really rapidly and we're trying to keep up with it and trying to make sure that screen time is a safe and perhaps healthy place to be. And that's really where a lot of our research is focused. I can only imagine how challenging it must be to work through that landscape. And because the technology advances way more quickly than the policies and legal landscape to control it, it really is pretty much whatever anybody wants to do, they do it and very little can be done about it. It's a really interesting picture, I know. We'll come back later and talk about what might be done about it. Tom, if you will help us understand the impact of all this. What are the effects on the diets of children and adolescents? I'm thinking particularly when Amanda was mentioning how many hours a day children are on it that three to four hours could be an underestimate of how much time they're spending. What did kids used to do with that time? I mean, if I think about when you and I were growing up, we did a lot of different things with that time. But what's it look like now? Well, that's one of the important questions that we don't really know a lot about because even experimental studies that I can talk about that look at reducing screen time have not been very good at being able to measure what else is going on or what substitutes for it. And so, a lot of the day we don't really know exactly what it's displacing and what happens when you reduce screen time. What replaces it? The assumption is that it's something that's more active than screen time. But, you know, it could be reading or homework or other sedentary behaviors that are more productive. But we really don't know. However, we do know that really the general consensus across all these studies that look at the relationship between screen time and nutrition is that the more time children spend using screens in general, the more calories they consume, the lower the nutritional quality of their diets and the greater their risk for obesity. A lot of these studies, as Amanda mentioned, were dominated by studies of television viewing, or looking at ...
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    43 minutos
  • E277: Food Fight - from plunder and profit to people and planet

    E277: Food Fight - from plunder and profit to people and planet
    Jun 27 2025
    Today we're talking with health and nutrition expert Dr. Stuart Gillespie, author of a new book entitled Food Fight: from Plunder and Profit to People and Planet. Using decades of research and insight gathered from around the world, Dr. Gillespie wants to reimagine our global food system and plot a way forward to a sustainable, equitable, and healthy food future - one where our food system isn't making us sick. Certainly not the case now. Over the course of his career, Dr. Gillespie has worked with the UN Standing Committee on Nutrition in Geneva with UNICEF in India and with the International Food Policy Research Institute, known as IFPRI, where he's led initiatives tackling the double burden of malnutrition and agriculture and health research. He holds a PhD in human nutrition from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Interview Summary So, you've really had a global view of the agriculture system, and this is captured in your book. And to give some context to our listeners, in your book, you describe the history of the global food system, how it's evolved into this system, sort of warped, if you will, into a mechanism that creates harm and it destroys more than it produces. That's a pretty bold statement. That it destroys more than it produces, given how much the agriculture around the world does produce. Tell us a bit more if you would. Yes, that statement actually emerged from recent work by the Food Systems Economic Commission. And they costed out the damage or the downstream harms generated by the global food system at around $15 trillion per year, which is 12% of GDP. And that manifests in various ways. Health harms or chronic disease. It also manifests in terms of climate crisis and risks and environmental harms, but also. Poverty of food system workers at the front line, if you like. And it's largely because we have a system that's anachronistic. It's a system that was built in a different time, in a different century for a different purpose. It was really started to come together after the second World War. To mass produce cheap calories to prevent famine, but also through the Green Revolution, as that was picking up with the overproduction of staples to use that strategically through food aid to buffer the West to certain extent from the spread of communism. And over time and over the last 50 years of neoliberal policies we've got a situation where food is less and less viewed as a human right, or a basic need. It's seen as a commodity and the system has become increasingly financialized. And there's a lot of evidence captured by a handful of transnationals, different ones at different points in the system from production to consumption. But in each case, they wield huge amounts of power. And that manifests in various ways. We have, I think a system that's anachronistic The point about it, and the problem we have, is that it's a system revolves around maximizing profit and the most profitable foods and products of those, which are actually the least healthy for us as individuals. And it's not a system that's designed to nourish us. It's a system designed to maximize profit. And we don't have a system that really aims to produce whole foods for people. We have a system that produces raw ingredients for industrial formulations to end up as ultra processed foods. We have a system that produces cattle feed and, and biofuels, and some whole foods. But it, you know, that it's so skewed now, and we see the evidence all around us that it manifests in all sorts of different ways. One in three people on the planet in some way malnourished. We have around 12 million adult deaths a year due to diet related chronic disease. And I followed that from colonial times that, that evolution and the way it operates and the way it moves across the world. And what is especially frightening, I think, is the speed at which this so-called nutrition transition or dietary transition is happening in lower income or middle income countries. We saw this happening over in the US and we saw it happening in the UK where I am. And then in Latin America, and then more Southeast Asia, then South Asia. Now, very much so in Sub-Saharan Africa where there is no regulation really, apart from perhaps South Africa. So that's long answer to your intro question. Let's dive into a couple of things that you brought up. First, the Green Revolution. So that's a term that many of our listeners will know and they'll understand what the Green Revolution is, but not everybody. Would you explain what that was and how it's had these effects throughout the food systems around the world? Yes, I mean around the, let's see, about 1950s, Norman Borlag, who was a crop breeder and his colleagues in Mexico discovered through crop breeding trials, a high yielding dwarf variety. But over time and working with different partners, including well in India as well, with the Swaminathan Foundation. And Swaminathan, for example, managed to ...
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    25 minutos
  • E276: Climate Change - A little less beef is part of the solution

    E276: Climate Change - A little less beef is part of the solution
    Jun 20 2025
    Interest and grave concern have been mounting over the impact of agriculture and the food choices we all make on the environment, particularly on climate change. With natural weather disasters occurring much more frequently and serious threats from warming of the atmosphere in general, it's natural to look for places to make change. One person who has thought a lot about this is our guest today, Dr. William Dietz of George Washington University. He's been a prominent voice in this space. Bill, you're one of the people in the field I respect most because our relationship goes back many years. Bill is professor and director of research and policy at the Global Food Institute at George Washington University. But especially pertinent to our discussion today is that Dr. Dietz was co-chair of the Lancet Commission on the global syndemic of obesity, under nutrition and climate change. Today, we'll focus on part of that discussion on beef in particular. Interview Summary Bill, let's start out with a basic question. What in the heck is a syndemic? A syndemic is a word that reflects the interaction of these three pandemics that we're facing. And those are obesity, under nutrition, and we've also called climate change a syndemic insofar as it affects human health. These three pandemics interact at both the biologic and social levels and have a synergistic adverse impact on each other. And they're driven by large scale social forces, which foster clustering and have a disparate impact on marginalized populations. Both in the developed and equally important, in the developing world. Here are a couple of examples of syndemics. So, increased greenhouse gases from high income countries reduce crop yields in the micronutrient content of crops, which in turn contribute to food insecurity and undernutrition in low and middle income countries. And eventually the reduction in crop yields and the micronutrient content of crops is going to affect high income countries. Beef production is a really important driver of the climate change, and we're a major contributor in terms of the US' contribution. And beef production drives both methane and nitrous oxide emissions, and in turn, the consumption of red and processed meat causes obesity, diabetes, colon cancer, and cardiovascular disease. And finally, obesity, stunting and nutrition insecurity occur in the same children and in the same population in low- and middle-income countries. Okay, so we'll come back to beef in a moment, but first, help us understand the importance of agriculture overall and our food choices in changing climate. Well, so I think we have to go back to where this, the increase in mean global surface temperatures began, in about 1950. Those temperatures have climbed in a linear fashion since then. And we're now approaching a key level of increase of 1.5 degrees centigrade. The increase in mean surface temperature is driven by increased greenhouse gases, and the US is particularly culpable in this respect. We're it's second only to China in terms of our greenhouse gas emissions. And on a per capita basis, we're in the top four with China, India, and Brazil and now the US. And in the US, agriculture contributes about 10% of greenhouse gas emissions, and about 30% of fossil fuels are responsible for greenhouse gas emissions. But when you look at the actual contribution of car use among the fossil fuel use, it's pretty close to the contribution of greenhouse gases from agriculture. The important point here is each one degree increase centigrade in air temperatures associated with a 7% increase in water vapor. And this is responsible for the major adverse weather events that we're seeing today in terms of increased frequency and severity of hurricanes, the droughts. And I learned a new term from the New York Times a couple of days ago from the science section, which is atmospheric thirst. I had trouble understanding how climate change would contribute to drought, but that same effect in terms of absorbing moisture that occurs and drives the adverse weather events also dries out the land. So increasingly there's increased need for water use, which is driven by atmospheric thirst. But that increase in air temperature and the increase in water vapor, is what really drives these storms. Because in the Pacific and in the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, this increase in air temperature is associated with an increase in water temperature, which further drives the increase in the severity of these storms. Thanks for that background. Now let's get to beef. You and I were not long ago at the Healthy Eating Research conference. And you gave what I thought was a very compelling talk on beef. We'll talk in a minute about how much beef figures into this overall picture, but first, tell us how beef production affects both climate and health. And you mentioned nitrous oxide and methane, but how does this all work? Cattle production is a big driver of the release of methane. ...
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    24 minutos

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