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The Barons Who Rule What We Eat

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Friday, April 4, 2025

Growing up, Austin Frerick recalls the fields of Iowa as lush and full of farm animals. Now, when he visits his hometown of Cedar Rapids, he sees a more barren landscape. The shift, or as he describes it, “the collapse of Iowa,” inspired the seventh-generation Iowan to look into the wealth and power that’s shaped the state, and subsequently, the American agriculture and food systems. Frerick’s widely-praised book, Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry, explores the titans who have amassed near monopolistic market domination of what we eat every day–and the systems that enabled them to amass power.  Chapter by chapter, Frerick profiles a family or company dominating the hog, grain, coffee, dairy, berry, slaughter, or grocery industries. Some are household names like Driscols and Walmart; others, like the Batista family who run the world’s largest butchering company, keep their names off their products. The profiles cover how each baron came to and maintained power, whether through government corruption, rapid acquisitions, or developing production models that dodged labor or environmental regulations.  The barons’ growth reveals how, in both visible and invisible ways, their products are intertwined in the larger food system. Ultimately, Frerick connects their actions—from building enormous hog confinements to skirting safety laws—to the various health and climate threats ailing communities across Iowa, America and the globe. Mother Jones recently caught up with Frerick to discuss the 2024 book and what it says against the backdrop of Trump’s plans, a growing MAHA movement, and skyrocketing food costs. Where did your interest in agriculture and food systems begin?  Cedar Rapids is a corn town, so much of your cereal, so much of your food, is manufactured there, and so it’s painted into the background. Also, part of my family is from up in the part of Iowa that used to be the prettiest; The Driftless region with rolling hills, dairy; and now there’s no animals on the land. You smell them, but you don’t see them. And you see the collapse of the family farm which has hollowed out these towns. There’s this imagery—people think of Iowa as like this Field of Dreams. But that’s not Iowa anymore. Field of Dreams Iowa died in my lifetime, and I think about that all the time. How did you first learn about the agriculture barons? I had an internship at a think tank, and they asked me to proofread school district data, and I sorted it by non-white, free and then reduced lunch rates; And I kept noticing the same seven small towns in Iowa. I was like, What’s going on here? Turns out they were all slaughterhouse towns. So I did my college thesis on this. I interviewed a principal where he told me about the additional support services that schools are required to bring because of the working poverty a lot of these students are growing up in. And in the next instant, he literally said, ‘The packers are great. They give me unlimited hot dogs for the back-to-school bash.’ And it was my advisor who said, ‘Do you not realize what’s going on there? That’s power. He can’t connect the fact that like all these issues are because of the slaughterhouse. These are modern day company towns.’ Your book centers on how these barons rose to become pillars of our global food system. How did they come to be?  This laissez faire era rewards a race to the bottom and the most ruthless players. Like most hog farmers, they weren’t willing in Iowa to shove their pigs into a metal shed where they don’t see a blade of grass. You reward the worst actors. And I think so much of the current American economy gets the worst people winning. “Iowa should be the Tuscany of North America. It has some of the world’s best soil yet it has an obesity crisis, a water crisis, and a cancer crisis.” Also, I think the food industry is the most concentrated space in America, but also the least appreciated. Look at Cargill (a multinational company that trades agriculture commodities and produces ultra-processed ingredients like corn syrup). It blows people’s minds when I tell them they’re the largest private company in America–they’re bigger than the Koch brothers. No one knows who they are, because they have a lot of middlemen who are not consumer facing. Even when they are consumer facing, a lot of times they own multiple brands, so you don’t even realize how consolidated that space is because you have this illusion of choice. How do the monopolies or oligopolies established affect the food we eat and what we pay?  We spend more money than the United Kingdom, Spain, Mexico, Canada, Greece, Japan, France, Germany, Sweden, Australia, Italy. So it’s like literally, we spend $1,000 more per person per year than some in the United Kingdom. So right now, the system is expensive, which, first of all, we shouldn’t be shocked about. That’s economics 101: concentrated markets gouge. It’s what they do. But second, something that I’ve come to appreciate is how much the system makes bad tasting food. We’re actually paying more for garbage.  And how do these barons impact the environment? Textbook monopoly is innovation: taste and price. But the environment, everything in the environment, there is a shifting of cost. They call it negative externalities in economics. You see it in Iowa. I view Iowa now as an extraction colony, like it’s really a 19th century coal mining town in terms of the power dynamics. The family hog farmer essentially died in my lifetime and this mass of industrial hogs took its place.  So Iowa has like 25 million hogs a year and they defecate three times more than us, so that’s manure of 75 million people. At the same time the regulatory structure has collapsed. And so Iowa is drowning in shit. The waterways were an open sewer, like 50 to 63 percent of the waterways in Iowa are too polluted for you to go in.  And then the last scary new thing we’re seeing is Iowa has the second-highest cancer rate in the country. And it’s clear it’s tied to the agricultural system in Iowa.  Iowa really is the canary in the coal mines of the American food system. Iowa should be the Tuscany of North America. It has some of the world’s best soil yet it has an obesity crisis, a water crisis, and a cancer crisis. In February, the Senate confirmed Brooke Rollins as Trump’s USDA secretary. What can we expect from her leadership, and how does that look in comparison to the legacy of Tom Vilsack, the former USDA secretary? More of the same. I really don’t see a policy difference between her and Vilsack. I would love to be proven wrong. To be fair, there hasn’t been a good secretary in my lifetime at USDA. But Vilsack failed to reign in the meat monopolies, these companies gouging everyone, gouging farmers, gouging at the store, employing children in slaughterhouses. He not only failed to do something, they actually got larger under the Biden administration.  In the most recent election, the rising cost of groceries was a major issue. Still, since Trump won we’ve seen him claim it will be hard to lower the price of groceries. What role do these barons have in the pricing of goods?  When you have so few players in the space, it’s so easy to act like a cartel and gouge. I think the best example, just the extent of the price gouging by the barons, is that McDonald’s is the largest buyer of beef in the world. Usually, you treat your largest customer the best: They say bark, you say woof. McDonald’s filed a lawsuit against the beef packers this fall for price fixing. So if you’re gouging your largest, best customer, that tells you everything.  I think that the really scary thing now is even Walmart’s getting hurt. Walmart’s like the king of kings, it’s the head honcho. People judge your grocery store based on the price and quality of the meat and dairy case. And Walmart’s response to being gouged by the barons is taking things into its own hands and making vertical plays into both beef and dairy by building its own beef plant in Wichita and then three dairy plants in America. I believe it wants insight into cost structure, so that way it knows when it negotiates with these barons it knows what it costs to produce a gallon of milk. I think the most powerful person in the American food system right now is a Walmart buyer.  Last congress extended the farm bill by one year as part of an effort to avert a government shutdown, so now it’ll likely be brought back up sometime this year. It’s become an industry defining bill. Can you share the gist of the farm bill and how it has shaped agriculture into a baron ruled system? Essentially, you have a quarter of it incentivizing people to over produce grains (through crop insurance systems), and then the other three fourths of it is a food assistance subsidy to the working poor of America. And I think the Farm Bill is collapsing in front of us right now because [Congress] can’t push it through. They’re trying to essentially pass a status quo Farm Bill, and they can’t even get it done. And I think partly it’s the MAHA influence, where younger men are obsessed with their bodies and so they’re repulsed by the Farm Bill. I mean, in fact, we get subsidies for Oreos, but not healthy food. And so you’re kind of seeing that break off into the MAHA. Senate Republicans want to pass it. House Republicans are much more like, let’s blow this thing up. And I think that’s what’s gonna be really curious to see.  It’s not like we’re eating more hogs. It’s more for export, and a lot of it’s to places like Mexico and China. Why are we destroying Iowa to feed China and Mexico?  I think the most likely outcome, actually, is they’re going to gut SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program], which is basically going to screw poor people or the working poor.  But again, one idea [Republicans] had, that I thought was a good idea, was they actually want to put SNAP under HHS, take it away from USDA. I think that’s a good idea. I don’t think they’ll actually do it. I assume everything they’re going to do is in the interest of the barons and the oligarchs.  Does change have to happen at state and local level first?  To me, that’s like the curse and blessing of the laboratories of democracy…You get things like unemployment insurance starting in Wisconsin and going national. Or, hopefully down the road, we see free school meals of Minnesota go national. But on the dark side, you see it play out too in the food system. In North Carolina, a state senator deregulated the hog industry that allowed this really exploitative industrial model to take hold and Iowa just copied it. One thing to keep in mind too about this hog production: It’s not like we’re eating more hogs. It’s more for export, and a lot of it’s to places like Mexico and China. Why are we destroying Iowa to feed China and Mexico?  I really do think there’s no party more tied into China than the Republican Party of Iowa. I mean, (former Iowa governor) Terry Branstad was Trump’s ambassador to China. The whole model of Iowa is overproduction and dumping these surpluses abroad. They can’t imagine a world of like, ‘Maybe we do less industrial pork, maybe we grow carrots, maybe we grow sheep?’ The really dark undercurrent is there’s all the xenophobic rhetoric, but [Iowa Republicans] are the most tied into that model. RFK Jr. and the MAHA movement seem keen to ban pesticides, seed oils, and ultraprocessed foods, many of which are central to some of the massive agriculture barons noted in your book, from Driscoll’s genetic work to Cargill’s high fructose corn syrup. How do you anticipate Big Ag industry leaders to respond to this?  Well, first of all, I think they have already started exerting some influence because no MAHA people got into USDA. So like, let’s just start there, they don’t have power. My takeaway from that whole thing is there really is a bipartisan chance to do something meaningful. Here you have a weird coalition of everyone just not seeing the system work. I mean, that is, you have the MAHA types latching onto it.  The barons tend to use the classic playbook. They drag things out. And so they’re going to try to delay the MAHA and hopefully the passion falls away.  Another policy change that agriculture may face is navigating the ongoing tariffs. Some Canadians are refusing to purchase produce made in the US. How does it impact these big Ag businesses? So much of the American Farm Bill now is designed to over produce a few things. So we essentially need to dump our surpluses abroad at the same time. These free trade agreements essentially allow the races to the bottom for produce production. Forty percent of your vegetables and 60 percent of fruit comes from outside the borders. Kind of like a T-shirt, when these supply chains move offshore, you see transparency collapse.  “This system is incredibly fragile, and it’s not sustainable.” But also keep in mind, farmers can’t compete on price, so they exit the market and then end up doing more corn and soy. These tariffs could break the current Farm Bill model in America, where we’re producing too many hogs for our consumption. We need to sell them to China. But also if a tariff war were to break out, what’s going to happen? What Trump did last time was essentially spend billions of dollars to do bailouts, to buy the surplus and take it off market. If anything, the tariffs are going to cost a lot of money.   What gives me hope is this system is incredibly fragile, and it’s not sustainable, and it’s going to break at some point. What we’re seeing with eggs is going to become normal, because you’re playing Russian roulette with disease in this industrial meat and dairy system. When you pack that many genetically similar animals into a metal shed, you’re going to get these massive disease outbreaks, and they will only continue to happen. So at some point you got to be like, is it worth it, or do we need a different production model? And these super concentrated systems are fragile. They’re going to keep breaking.  In the coffee baron chapter you note how in many cases researchers and economists earn a hefty income providing evidence that encourages monopolistic behavior. How does this impact everyday citizens? And what do you anticipate the future of this research industry?  I think the most corrupt academic discipline in America right now is agricultural economics. When you start talking to folks, you realize every commodity has go-to hack academics. I talk about a certain Ag economist at Iowa State, who is just the go-to academic for the hog baron. Even though, for example, we know that working at a slaughterhouse is one of the most dangerous jobs in America, and the hog baron wants to speed up the kill lines to make more money, magically, this Ag economist says this is good for Iowa farmers. He’s also in business with a hog baron. He is a corporate witness for them, and he usually doesn’t disclose it. So not only is it corrupting the literature, it’s corrupting the public discourse. And, to your average American, here’s a fancy sounding title from an academic from a university saying this is not a real issue. It’s helping to hide the crisis among the workers, the climate, and the food system.  In a time where agriculture is, as you note in your book, largely dominated by these oligopolies. Where is the most progress being made to disrupt these barons?  There’s two questions I always get asked when I do book events. One is, do you worry about your safety, and it’s always from a nice old lady. The second one is always, and this is usually from audience members at the more coastal events: Why are these people voting against their economic interest? And that question always bothered me because it was a Democrat [Vilsack] in Iowa that undermined the rebellion of people fighting with hog barons. I think there’s a degree of people, especially in these more rural communities, that just don’t trust anyone anymore. They want to blow up the whole system.  Here’s the thing: people for decades have been talking about monopolies, but no one’s done anything. We all agree that we’re being short changed by these barons. You have to articulate to folks what the system could be so that people feel like they can overcome that.  Start locally. The first anti-monopoly laws in the world started in Iowa, were written by Iowa farmers mad about being gouged by grain elevators. It rippled across the country and then the federal government essentially did a version of that bill. There’s a lot of people doing it right.  I really learned while writing this book that most people are trying to do the right thing. They’re just running uphill. And it’s just the greed of a few people holding us back. The system we have now is radical. So much of what we talked about is traditional. I just want animals on the land.  This interview has been edited and condensed.

Growing up, Austin Frerick recalls the fields of Iowa as lush and full of farm animals. Now, when he visits his hometown of Cedar Rapids, he sees a more barren landscape. The shift, or as he describes it, “the collapse of Iowa,” inspired the seventh-generation Iowan to look into the wealth and power that’s shaped […]

Growing up, Austin Frerick recalls the fields of Iowa as lush and full of farm animals. Now, when he visits his hometown of Cedar Rapids, he sees a more barren landscape. The shift, or as he describes it, “the collapse of Iowa,” inspired the seventh-generation Iowan to look into the wealth and power that’s shaped the state, and subsequently, the American agriculture and food systems. Frerick’s widely-praised book, Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry, explores the titans who have amassed near monopolistic market domination of what we eat every day–and the systems that enabled them to amass power. 

Chapter by chapter, Frerick profiles a family or company dominating the hog, grain, coffee, dairy, berry, slaughter, or grocery industries. Some are household names like Driscols and Walmart; others, like the Batista family who run the world’s largest butchering company, keep their names off their products. The profiles cover how each baron came to and maintained power, whether through government corruption, rapid acquisitions, or developing production models that dodged labor or environmental regulations. 

The barons’ growth reveals how, in both visible and invisible ways, their products are intertwined in the larger food system. Ultimately, Frerick connects their actions—from building enormous hog confinements to skirting safety laws—to the various health and climate threats ailing communities across Iowa, America and the globe. Mother Jones recently caught up with Frerick to discuss the 2024 book and what it says against the backdrop of Trump’s plans, a growing MAHA movement, and skyrocketing food costs.

Where did your interest in agriculture and food systems begin? 

Cedar Rapids is a corn town, so much of your cereal, so much of your food, is manufactured there, and so it’s painted into the background.

Also, part of my family is from up in the part of Iowa that used to be the prettiest; The Driftless region with rolling hills, dairy; and now there’s no animals on the land. You smell them, but you don’t see them. And you see the collapse of the family farm which has hollowed out these towns.

There’s this imagery—people think of Iowa as like this Field of Dreams. But that’s not Iowa anymore. Field of Dreams Iowa died in my lifetime, and I think about that all the time.

How did you first learn about the agriculture barons?

I had an internship at a think tank, and they asked me to proofread school district data, and I sorted it by non-white, free and then reduced lunch rates; And I kept noticing the same seven small towns in Iowa. I was like, What’s going on here? Turns out they were all slaughterhouse towns. So I did my college thesis on this. I interviewed a principal where he told me about the additional support services that schools are required to bring because of the working poverty a lot of these students are growing up in. And in the next instant, he literally said, ‘The packers are great. They give me unlimited hot dogs for the back-to-school bash.’ And it was my advisor who said, ‘Do you not realize what’s going on there? That’s power. He can’t connect the fact that like all these issues are because of the slaughterhouse. These are modern day company towns.’

Your book centers on how these barons rose to become pillars of our global food system. How did they come to be? 

This laissez faire era rewards a race to the bottom and the most ruthless players. Like most hog farmers, they weren’t willing in Iowa to shove their pigs into a metal shed where they don’t see a blade of grass. You reward the worst actors. And I think so much of the current American economy gets the worst people winning.

“Iowa should be the Tuscany of North America. It has some of the world’s best soil yet it has an obesity crisis, a water crisis, and a cancer crisis.”

Also, I think the food industry is the most concentrated space in America, but also the least appreciated. Look at Cargill (a multinational company that trades agriculture commodities and produces ultra-processed ingredients like corn syrup). It blows people’s minds when I tell them they’re the largest private company in America–they’re bigger than the Koch brothers. No one knows who they are, because they have a lot of middlemen who are not consumer facing. Even when they are consumer facing, a lot of times they own multiple brands, so you don’t even realize how consolidated that space is because you have this illusion of choice.

How do the monopolies or oligopolies established affect the food we eat and what we pay? 

We spend more money than the United Kingdom, Spain, Mexico, Canada, Greece, Japan, France, Germany, Sweden, Australia, Italy. So it’s like literally, we spend $1,000 more per person per year than some in the United Kingdom. So right now, the system is expensive, which, first of all, we shouldn’t be shocked about. That’s economics 101: concentrated markets gouge. It’s what they do. But second, something that I’ve come to appreciate is how much the system makes bad tasting food. We’re actually paying more for garbage. 

And how do these barons impact the environment?

Textbook monopoly is innovation: taste and price. But the environment, everything in the environment, there is a shifting of cost. They call it negative externalities in economics. You see it in Iowa. I view Iowa now as an extraction colony, like it’s really a 19th century coal mining town in terms of the power dynamics. The family hog farmer essentially died in my lifetime and this mass of industrial hogs took its place. 

So Iowa has like 25 million hogs a year and they defecate three times more than us, so that’s manure of 75 million people. At the same time the regulatory structure has collapsed. And so Iowa is drowning in shit. The waterways were an open sewer, like 50 to 63 percent of the waterways in Iowa are too polluted for you to go in. 

And then the last scary new thing we’re seeing is Iowa has the second-highest cancer rate in the country. And it’s clear it’s tied to the agricultural system in Iowa. 

Iowa really is the canary in the coal mines of the American food system. Iowa should be the Tuscany of North America. It has some of the world’s best soil yet it has an obesity crisis, a water crisis, and a cancer crisis.

In February, the Senate confirmed Brooke Rollins as Trump’s USDA secretary. What can we expect from her leadership, and how does that look in comparison to the legacy of Tom Vilsack, the former USDA secretary?

More of the same. I really don’t see a policy difference between her and Vilsack. I would love to be proven wrong. To be fair, there hasn’t been a good secretary in my lifetime at USDA. But Vilsack failed to reign in the meat monopolies, these companies gouging everyone, gouging farmers, gouging at the store, employing children in slaughterhouses. He not only failed to do something, they actually got larger under the Biden administration. 

In the most recent election, the rising cost of groceries was a major issue. Still, since Trump won we’ve seen him claim it will be hard to lower the price of groceries. What role do these barons have in the pricing of goods? 

When you have so few players in the space, it’s so easy to act like a cartel and gouge. I think the best example, just the extent of the price gouging by the barons, is that McDonald’s is the largest buyer of beef in the world. Usually, you treat your largest customer the best: They say bark, you say woof. McDonald’s filed a lawsuit against the beef packers this fall for price fixing. So if you’re gouging your largest, best customer, that tells you everything. 

I think that the really scary thing now is even Walmart’s getting hurt. Walmart’s like the king of kings, it’s the head honcho. People judge your grocery store based on the price and quality of the meat and dairy case. And Walmart’s response to being gouged by the barons is taking things into its own hands and making vertical plays into both beef and dairy by building its own beef plant in Wichita and then three dairy plants in America. I believe it wants insight into cost structure, so that way it knows when it negotiates with these barons it knows what it costs to produce a gallon of milk. I think the most powerful person in the American food system right now is a Walmart buyer. 

Last congress extended the farm bill by one year as part of an effort to avert a government shutdown, so now it’ll likely be brought back up sometime this year. It’s become an industry defining bill. Can you share the gist of the farm bill and how it has shaped agriculture into a baron ruled system?

Essentially, you have a quarter of it incentivizing people to over produce grains (through crop insurance systems), and then the other three fourths of it is a food assistance subsidy to the working poor of America. And I think the Farm Bill is collapsing in front of us right now because [Congress] can’t push it through. They’re trying to essentially pass a status quo Farm Bill, and they can’t even get it done. And I think partly it’s the MAHA influence, where younger men are obsessed with their bodies and so they’re repulsed by the Farm Bill. I mean, in fact, we get subsidies for Oreos, but not healthy food. And so you’re kind of seeing that break off into the MAHA. Senate Republicans want to pass it. House Republicans are much more like, let’s blow this thing up. And I think that’s what’s gonna be really curious to see. 

It’s not like we’re eating more hogs. It’s more for export, and a lot of it’s to places like Mexico and China. Why are we destroying Iowa to feed China and Mexico? 

I think the most likely outcome, actually, is they’re going to gut SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program], which is basically going to screw poor people or the working poor. 

But again, one idea [Republicans] had, that I thought was a good idea, was they actually want to put SNAP under HHS, take it away from USDA. I think that’s a good idea. I don’t think they’ll actually do it. I assume everything they’re going to do is in the interest of the barons and the oligarchs. 

Does change have to happen at state and local level first? 

To me, that’s like the curse and blessing of the laboratories of democracy…You get things like unemployment insurance starting in Wisconsin and going national. Or, hopefully down the road, we see free school meals of Minnesota go national. But on the dark side, you see it play out too in the food system. In North Carolina, a state senator deregulated the hog industry that allowed this really exploitative industrial model to take hold and Iowa just copied it. One thing to keep in mind too about this hog production: It’s not like we’re eating more hogs. It’s more for export, and a lot of it’s to places like Mexico and China. Why are we destroying Iowa to feed China and Mexico? 

I really do think there’s no party more tied into China than the Republican Party of Iowa. I mean, (former Iowa governor) Terry Branstad was Trump’s ambassador to China. The whole model of Iowa is overproduction and dumping these surpluses abroad. They can’t imagine a world of like, ‘Maybe we do less industrial pork, maybe we grow carrots, maybe we grow sheep?’ The really dark undercurrent is there’s all the xenophobic rhetoric, but [Iowa Republicans] are the most tied into that model.

RFK Jr. and the MAHA movement seem keen to ban pesticides, seed oils, and ultraprocessed foods, many of which are central to some of the massive agriculture barons noted in your book, from Driscoll’s genetic work to Cargill’s high fructose corn syrup. How do you anticipate Big Ag industry leaders to respond to this? 

Well, first of all, I think they have already started exerting some influence because no MAHA people got into USDA. So like, let’s just start there, they don’t have power. My takeaway from that whole thing is there really is a bipartisan chance to do something meaningful. Here you have a weird coalition of everyone just not seeing the system work. I mean, that is, you have the MAHA types latching onto it. 

The barons tend to use the classic playbook. They drag things out. And so they’re going to try to delay the MAHA and hopefully the passion falls away. 

Another policy change that agriculture may face is navigating the ongoing tariffs. Some Canadians are refusing to purchase produce made in the US. How does it impact these big Ag businesses?

So much of the American Farm Bill now is designed to over produce a few things. So we essentially need to dump our surpluses abroad at the same time. These free trade agreements essentially allow the races to the bottom for produce production. Forty percent of your vegetables and 60 percent of fruit comes from outside the borders. Kind of like a T-shirt, when these supply chains move offshore, you see transparency collapse. 

“This system is incredibly fragile, and it’s not sustainable.”

But also keep in mind, farmers can’t compete on price, so they exit the market and then end up doing more corn and soy. These tariffs could break the current Farm Bill model in America, where we’re producing too many hogs for our consumption. We need to sell them to China. But also if a tariff war were to break out, what’s going to happen? What Trump did last time was essentially spend billions of dollars to do bailouts, to buy the surplus and take it off market. If anything, the tariffs are going to cost a lot of money.  

What gives me hope is this system is incredibly fragile, and it’s not sustainable, and it’s going to break at some point. What we’re seeing with eggs is going to become normal, because you’re playing Russian roulette with disease in this industrial meat and dairy system. When you pack that many genetically similar animals into a metal shed, you’re going to get these massive disease outbreaks, and they will only continue to happen. So at some point you got to be like, is it worth it, or do we need a different production model? And these super concentrated systems are fragile. They’re going to keep breaking. 

In the coffee baron chapter you note how in many cases researchers and economists earn a hefty income providing evidence that encourages monopolistic behavior. How does this impact everyday citizens? And what do you anticipate the future of this research industry? 

I think the most corrupt academic discipline in America right now is agricultural economics. When you start talking to folks, you realize every commodity has go-to hack academics. I talk about a certain Ag economist at Iowa State, who is just the go-to academic for the hog baron. Even though, for example, we know that working at a slaughterhouse is one of the most dangerous jobs in America, and the hog baron wants to speed up the kill lines to make more money, magically, this Ag economist says this is good for Iowa farmers. He’s also in business with a hog baron. He is a corporate witness for them, and he usually doesn’t disclose it. So not only is it corrupting the literature, it’s corrupting the public discourse. And, to your average American, here’s a fancy sounding title from an academic from a university saying this is not a real issue. It’s helping to hide the crisis among the workers, the climate, and the food system. 

In a time where agriculture is, as you note in your book, largely dominated by these oligopolies. Where is the most progress being made to disrupt these barons? 

There’s two questions I always get asked when I do book events. One is, do you worry about your safety, and it’s always from a nice old lady. The second one is always, and this is usually from audience members at the more coastal events: Why are these people voting against their economic interest? And that question always bothered me because it was a Democrat [Vilsack] in Iowa that undermined the rebellion of people fighting with hog barons. I think there’s a degree of people, especially in these more rural communities, that just don’t trust anyone anymore. They want to blow up the whole system. 

Here’s the thing: people for decades have been talking about monopolies, but no one’s done anything. We all agree that we’re being short changed by these barons. You have to articulate to folks what the system could be so that people feel like they can overcome that. 

Start locally. The first anti-monopoly laws in the world started in Iowa, were written by Iowa farmers mad about being gouged by grain elevators. It rippled across the country and then the federal government essentially did a version of that bill. There’s a lot of people doing it right. 

I really learned while writing this book that most people are trying to do the right thing. They’re just running uphill. And it’s just the greed of a few people holding us back. The system we have now is radical. So much of what we talked about is traditional. I just want animals on the land. 

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Read the full story here.
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How Do Cancer Cells Migrate to New Tissues and Take Hold?

Scientists are looking for answers about how these confounding trips, known as metastases, occur throughout the human body

How Do Cancer Cells Migrate to New Tissues and Take Hold? Scientists are looking for answers about how these confounding trips, known as metastases, occur throughout the human body Illustration of a human cancer cell SCIEPRO / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY via Getty Images Back in 2014, a woman with advanced cancer pushed Adrienne Boire’s scientific life in a whole new direction. The cancer, which had begun in the breast, had found its way into the patient’s spinal fluid, rendering the middle-aged mother of two unable to walk. “When did this happen?” she asked from her hospital bed. “Why are the cells growing there?” Why, indeed. Why would cancer cells migrate to the spinal fluid, far from where they’d been birthed, and how did they manage to thrive in a liquid so strikingly poor in nutrients? Boire, a physician-scientist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, decided that those questions deserved answers. The answers are urgent, because the same thing that happened to Boire’s patient is happening to increasing numbers of cancer patients. As the ability to treat initial, or primary, tumors has improved, people survive early rounds with cancer only to come back years or decades later when the cancer has somehow resettled in a new tissue, such as brain, lung or bone. This is metastatic cancer, and it’s the big killer—while precise numbers are scarce, anywhere from half to the large majority of cancer deaths have been attributed to metastasis. Offering people more options and hope will mean understanding how those cancers successfully migrate and recolonize. The prevalence of metastasis belies the arduous journey that cancer cells must make to achieve it. A cell that arises in, say, the breast, is well adapted to live there: to eat the fatty acids available to it, to resist local threats and to grow there in a solid tumor. If it manages to escape into the bloodstream, it finds itself zipping along at up to 15 inches per second with shear stresses sufficient to rip it apart. Should it survive that odyssey and land in a new tissue—say, the brain or spinal fluid—the environment is totally different yet again. The foods the cell is accustomed to may be absent; immune cells or other novel environmental molecules may attack. For a cell to manage this trip, and then adapt to a new environment, is truly a Herculean task. “It is not easy and trivial,” says Ana Gomes, a cancer biologist at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida. “It’s just against everything in the nature of these cells.” Moving to a new site and forming a new tumor is an arduous journey that few cells can complete. A cell must exit the initial tumor, survive the bloodstream and enter a new tissue. Even then, the cell may remain dormant for a time, until the environment can support its division and growth to create a new tumor. Adapted from Ana Gomes / Knowable Magazine No wonder that, even though tumors regularly shed cells, most escapees perish or languish without successfully establishing themselves as metastases. “Personally, I think metastasis is an accident,” says Matthew Vander Heiden, a physician-scientist and director of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. “It’s really, really inefficient.” The few cells that manage this epic feat are resilient and flexible in how they feed themselves and process the molecules around them. They may tweak their biochemistry to evade local dangers, or to get the fuel they need in sparse environments. Some even send signals ahead to modify the organ where they’ll land, creating a cushy nest with a food supply ready for when they arrive. “Metabolic changes help these cells to face all this challenge,” says Patricia Altea-Manzano, a biomedical researcher at the Andalusian Molecular Biology and Regenerative Medicine Center in Seville, Spain. Such findings suggest ways that metastasizing cells, because they’re so different from the original tumor, might be vulnerable to new kinds of treatment. Someday doctors might not have to wait for metastasis to take hold before they block or slow cancer’s spread: “That is a very big opportunity,” Gomes says. Novel adaptations Metabolically, there’s no place like home: Cancers tend to do best in the tissues where they initially grow, Vander Heiden’s group has found. And when they do move, these primary tumors have preferred target sites—prostate cancers tend to move into bone, for example. Some cells, however, will land in a place to which they are very unlikely to ever adapt: Certain sites, such as the spleen and skeletal muscles, seem to resist metastasis, and there are many possible reasons. Muscle cells, for example, use tons of energy, causing their mitochondria to release lots of a side product of energy processing: reactive oxygen species such as hydrogen peroxide. These vigorously oxidizing molecules are toxic, but local muscle cells can handle them. Yet even though plenty of tumor cells reach the skeletal muscle via the blood that copiously feeds it, they rarely take hold there, stymied, researchers suspect, by those reactive oxygen molecules. But adaptation to other novel environments is possible, as Vander Heiden discovered when his group implanted human breast cancer cells into either mammary fat or the brains of mice. Though the brain lacks the kinds of fat building blocks—fatty acids—that breast cancer cells are accustomed to eating, when the cells were dropped into the brain, they adjusted to manufacture their own fatty acids. The scientists then treated the mice with a drug that blocks fatty acid synthesis, and the cancer cells in brain tissue grew at half-speed. (The breast cells in the mammary fat continued to grow unbothered.) Vander Heiden has consulted for companies that are in the early stages of exploring this approach as a treatment. Sometimes, tumors can even prime a foreign site for their arrival, in a process some researchers call “education of the metastatic niche.” Cancers shed not only cells, but also hormones, DNA and little fatty bubbles called vesicles into the blood and lymph. These bubbles can contain chemical messages, and when these or other signals reach far-off organs, they can reshape the tissues to the tumor cells’ specifications. That “education” helps set up metastasizing cells to thrive in a new location says Gomes. Even microbes can get in on the act: In the case of colorectal cancer, bacteria from the intestines teach the liver to receive metastatic cancer cells. The gut bacteria colonize the intestinal tumor, then break through the multilayer barrier that normally keeps gut contents away from the rest of the body. Then the bacteria can go into the liver, where they induce inflammation in the organ. This creates a pro-tumor environment, so cancer cells that arrive later are able to settle in. The fatty acid connection Altea-Manzano studied this priming process during her time as a postdoctoral scholar with cancer biologist Sarah-Maria Fendt at the VIB-KU Leuven Center for Cancer Biology in Belgium. In this case, it was the lungs that were being primed by tumors residing elsewhere. And much as Vander Heiden observed with breast cancer metastasis to the brain, access to fatty acids was a key factor—specifically, the fatty acid palmitate, whose functions include serving as an energy source and as a component of cellular membranes. The lungs are already awash in a fat-rich material called surfactant, which coats the lungs’ interior and keeps the tissue from collapsing. When the researchers fed mice a high-fat diet, the levels of palmitate and other fatty acids in the lungs rose. And when the researchers injected mouse mammary (breast) cancer cells into the blood of those mice, the high-fat diet resulted in more than twice as much metastasis to the lung. To check whether tumor cells were secreting something that primed the lungs to host them, Altea-Manzano and colleagues grew pieces of mouse mammary tumor in a dish, then collected the liquid containing all the cellular secretions. When they injected this cell-free soup into mice, it boosted the palmitate levels in the lungs; if they also injected cancer cells, this treatment increased the level of lung metastases by those cells, too. Some ingredient made by the cancer cells cultured in that lab dish was sending the lungs a message: Make more palmitate. (The scientists still aren’t sure what the signaling substance is.) The result is that if a breast cancer cell lands in the lungs, it finds a fatty, ready-made feast to nosh on. To make the most of the new menu, however, a newly arrived breast cancer cell will have to alter its cell chemistry. It does that by changing its mitochondria so they can take up more palmitate. In experiments with mice, blocking that change interfered with metastasis, no matter how much palmitate was present. It might do the same in human patients, speculates Altea-Manzano, who with Fendt and others was a co-author of a discussion of metabolic changes that might promote or thwart metastasis for the 2024 Annual Review of Cancer Biology. A person’s lifestyle as well as their environment can influence their metabolism and microbiome. That, in turn, can be a factor in the success or failure of cancer to metastasize. But the relationships are complex: Things that seem good for metabolism on the surface—such as antioxidants—aren’t always things that directly counter cancer spread. Adapted from A. Vandekeere et al. / AR Cancer Biology 2024 / Knowable Magazine Knowing the enemy In addition to fat-rich places like the lungs, cancers can adapt to surprisingly challenging locales, such as the barren wasteland that is the spinal fluid surrounding the brain and spinal cord. Most places in the body where tumors originate are replete with nutrients: fats, amino acids, oxygen, metals—all the foodstuffs a rapidly growing cell needs. In contrast, “the brain is kind of a metabolic princess,” says Boire. “It prefers glucose only, please.” Not only is there precious little to eat, but cancer cells will find themselves surrounded by support cells of the nervous system and resident immune cells, both of which spew out anti-tumor agents. Boire’s work focuses on the spinal fluid. It’s a clear liquid devoid of many nutrients, and yet metastasis to the spinal fluid happens in some 5 percent to 10 percent of solid-tumor patients, and it usually kills within months. For Boire, this makes such a cancer “a worthy adversary. … It’s totally evil.” To learn how such an evil cell survives, Boire and colleagues examined metastatic cells from five patients in whom breast or lung cancers had taken over the spinal fluid. These cells had all ramped up a biochemical system that sops up iron, a necessary metal to produce energy and more cell parts. As one part of the system, the cells secreted a protein called lipocalin-2 that collects the sparse iron in the environment; for the other part, they made a protein called a lipocalin-2-iron transporter that pulls the iron-lipocalin-2 complex into the cells. Mice studied as models for metastasis to the spinal fluid normally all die within fewer than 40 days. But when scientists treated the mice with a drug, deferoxamine, that prevents the cancer from accessing iron, they live for longer. Adapted from Y. Chi et al. / Science 2020 / Knowable Magazine Studying the process further in mice, Boire’s team discovered that the cancer cells boost their iron collection in response to inflammatory molecules produced by local immune cells. The cancer cells then slurp up so much iron that the immune cells can’t meet their own needs for the metal. “They’re like the original jerks at the buffet,” says Boire. “You know these guys—they’re taking everything you want for themselves.” To starve out these cellular creeps, the researchers treated mice with a molecule called deferoxamine that snatches the iron before lipocalin-2 has a chance to grab it. Sure enough, the iron levels in the cancer cells dropped. Moreover, the mice survived nearly twice as long as animals who didn’t get the treatment. Boire has begun testing deferoxamine in a few dozen patients who have metastatic cancer in the spinal fluid and expects to publish results soon. She notes that the treatment doesn’t act directly on the cancer but changes its environment so it can’t fulfill its needs. “It kind of opens up this idea—there are other ways of targeting cancer cell growth,” she says. Stress points In addition to food, traveling cancer cells need protection from changes to their metabolism in new environments. Metastasis itself seems to cause cancer cells to generate reactive oxygen species, which can kill them from within, says Sean Morrison, a cancer biologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. His team studies this metastasis roadblock by injecting human melanoma cells into mice. The scientists can put the cells right under the skin where they should be comfortable, or stick them into other places, such as the bloodstream or spleen, to see if they can achieve metastasis. In the skin, melanoma cells don’t experience much oxidative stress. But melanoma cells in the blood or other organs experience stress from higher levels of reactive oxygen molecule levels. It could be that higher levels of iron and oxygen in places like the blood drive biochemical changes that produce these dangerous molecules, Morrison suggests. Oxidative stress kills wandering melanoma cells by a process called ferroptosis, in which polyunsaturated fatty acids in the cancer cell membrane react with iron. “It’s like a grease fire starting in the cancer cells as they’re trying to migrate,” says Morrison. But some melanoma cells gain a defense if they cruise the body’s lymphatic system before settling down. In the lymph, their membranes pick up monounsaturated fatty acids that can’t react with iron in the same way, helping them resist ferroptosis, the researchers reported. That’s not all. Melanoma cells that were the most efficient at metastasis rewired their metabolism, the scientists found. As a result, they gorged on a molecule called lactate in their surroundings, and they seemed to use this lactate to manufacture protective, oxidant-fighting molecules. When the scientists blocked the ability of the melanoma cells to suck up this lactate, metastatic disease in the mice was reduced. In contrast, when they treated mice with more antioxidants, metastasizing cells were more likely to survive in the bloodstream and other organs—in some treated mice, the numbers of metastatic cells cruising the bloodstream more than doubled. That result, published in 2015, was a huge surprise, says Morrison: “People think of antioxidants as being good for you.” Well, in his lab mice, antioxidants were good for cancer cells too—really good. The Washington Post called the study “terrifying,” “provocative” and “alarming.” In an experiment, scientists studied a line of mice that had melanoma injected under their skin. Treatment with an antioxidant greatly increased the fraction of cells in blood that were metastasizing melanoma cells (left), as well as the burden—quantity—of metastatic cancer cells in their internal organs (right). Adapted from E. Piskounova et al. / Nature 2015 / Knowable Magazine But the results do jive with past trials of antioxidants in cancer patients. In studies spanning decades, antioxidants such as beta-carotene and vitamin E were linked to increased lung cancer rates and deaths in smokers and higher prostate cancer rates in healthy men. Although those studies did not focus on metastatic cancer, Morrison sees a connection. “The reality is that at certain key phases of the evolution of cancer, the cancer cells are just on the edge of dying of oxidative stress, so they benefit more from the antioxidants than the normal cells do,” he speculates. If antioxidants are good for cancers, then boosting reactive oxygen molecules might fight some kinds of metastasis. Indeed, some current cancer treatments do amplify reactive oxygen molecules to kill cancers. These results imply that diet choices or supplements might influence cancer and metastasis risk. For example, Morrison speculates that a diet high in polyunsaturated fatty acids might lead to more of those pro-ferroptosis fatty acids in the membranes of cancer cells. If the cells are already quite vulnerable, a bit of polyunsaturated fat might be another way to nudge them over the cliff to cell death. For once, that’s an easy diet to swallow: One menu item might be salmon seared in soybean oil, Morrison suggests. Dietary change is not going to vanquish cancer on its own, Fendt says. But, she adds, it might slow progression or help other treatments to work—although as the antioxidant trials illustrate, the effects of diet can be tricky to predict. “It’s important to have really solid and rigorous science on those questions,” cautions Fendt. Some trials are underway—but, for now, there’s no “anti-metastasis” diet to prescribe.Knowable Magazine is an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. Get the latest Science stories in your inbox.

Animals
Chemicals
Culture

Peta urges Gail’s Bakery to drop extra charge for plant milk

Animal rights charity argues surcharge of 40-60p discriminates against dairy-free customers A leading animal rights charity has launched a campaign calling for Gail’s Bakery to drop its surcharge on plant-based milks, claiming it “unfairly discriminates” against customers with dairy intolerances or those trying to make more ethical choices.Gail’s, a chain that is expanding rapidly in Britain, charges 40p to 60p extra if customers want oat or soya milk in their coffee or tea. Continue reading...

A leading animal rights charity has launched a campaign calling for Gail’s Bakery to drop its surcharge on plant-based milks, claiming it “unfairly discriminates” against customers with dairy intolerances or those trying to make more ethical choices.Gail’s, a chain that is expanding rapidly in Britain, charges 40p to 60p extra if customers want oat or soya milk in their coffee or tea.With at least one in three Britons now drinking plant-based milks, other high-street coffee chains tend to offer one – soya – for free, though other dairy-free alternatives such as oat, almond and coconut milk often still come at a cost.Peta has called for Gail’s to drop its extra charge. Dawn Carr, the charity’s vice-president of vegan projects, told the Guardian: “Gail’s is milking customers who care about animals and the planet by offering a discount on reusable cups but still charging extra for plant milk.“Dairy milk is an environmental disaster, cruel to cows, and bad for human health. We’re calling on [Gail’s] to ditch the upcharge and encourage all conscious coffee drinkers to join Peta’s campaign.”Last month, Sir Paul McCartney wrote to the US chain Peet’s Coffee asking it to drop its extra charge for non-dairy milk. Within days, Peet’s climbed down.The former Beatle, who has been a vegetarian since 1975, wrote at the time: “It recently came to my attention that Peet’s has an extra charge for plant-based milks as opposed to cow’s milk.“I must say this surprised me, as I understand that your company is committed to reducing methane emissions and water waste, yet cow’s milk significantly contributes to them.”Pret a Manger stopped charging extra for plant-based milks such as oat, almond, soya and rice-coconut in the UK in 2020 after calls from animal rights advocates. Starbucks dropped its vegan milk surcharge in the UK in 2022. Leon and Joe and the Juice do not charge extra for any standard dairy-free milk alternatives.Costa Coffee and Caffe Nero do not charge for soya milk, but oat and coconut milk are an additional 45p at both. Costa also has an “ultimate blend” plant-based milk alternative at some stores for 35p. Peta has also renewed its calls for these extra charges to be dropped.Campaigners and animal rights advocates have long said these extra costs discriminate against people searching for dairy-free alternatives, with some claiming it amounts to a “tax” that should instead be applied to dairy because of its cost to the animals and the environment. But critics have said that almond milk uses large quantities of water in its production.Dale Vince, a green energy industrialist and ambassador for the charity Veganuary, said the charges were an example of “premium pricing” for plant-based foods, which tend overall to have a lower environmental impact. “This is a rip-off, plain and simple – part of the premium pricing of plant-based foods, which by their very nature cost less,” he said.skip past newsletter promotionThe planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essentialPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionCarr added: “It’s true that almond milk uses more water to produce than oat milk, but the amount pales compared to that needed to make dairy milk. Slurry run-off from dairy factory farm manure and urine pollutes waterways, methane damages the ozone layer, and transport and slaughter of cows is extremely energy-intensive.“If anything, businesses should charge more for dairy to better reflect the true cost to the animals and the planet. But they certainly need to eliminate the unfair and damaging upcharge on vegan milks.”Toni Vernelli, Veganuary’s head of communications, said: “The cost of many plant milks has come down dramatically in recent years, so many of the surcharges – which range from 25p to 50p – are out of proportion to the extra expense the vendor incurs.”Gail’s declined to comment. Last year the chain, which has been described as a “political bellwether” for middle-class Britain, faced controversy over its expansion plans amid fears it would push out independent coffee houses. Its first outlet opened in Hampstead, north-west London, in 2005 and there are now about 170 branches in the UK.

Animals
Business
Food

Invisible losses: thousands of plant species are missing from places they could thrive – and humans are the reason

Many native plants are missing from habitats where they should thrive – even in wilder areas. Why? Human actions such as logging, poaching and setting fires.

Samantha Terrell/ShutterstockIf you go walking in the wild, you might expect that what you’re seeing is natural. All around you are trees, shrubs and grasses growing in their natural habitat. But there’s something here that doesn’t add up. Across the world, there are large areas of habitat which would suit native plant species just fine. But very often, they’re simply absent. Our new research gauges the scale of this problem, known as “dark diversity”. Our international team of 200 scientists examined plant species in thousands of sites worldwide. What we found was startling. In regions heavily affected by our activities, only about 20% of native plant species able to live there were actually present. But even in areas with very little human interference, ecosystems only contained about 33% of viable plant species. Why so few species in wilder areas? Our impact. Pollution can spread far from the original source, while conversion of habitat to farms, logging and human-caused fires have ripple effects too. Conspicuous by their absence Our activities have become a planet-shaping force, from changing the climate through our emissions to farming 44% of all habitable land. As our footprint has expanded, other species have been pushed to extinction. The rates of species loss are unprecedented in recorded history. When we think about biodiversity loss, we might think of a once-common animal species losing numbers and range as farms, cities and feral predators expand. But we are also losing species from within protected areas and national parks. To date, the accelerating loss of species has been largely observed at large scale, such as states or even whole countries. Almost 600 plant species have gone extinct since 1750 – and this is likely a major underestimate. Extinction hotspots include Hawaii (79 species) and South Africa’s unique fynbos scrublands (37 species). But tracking the fate of our species has been difficult to do at a local scale, such as within a national park or nature reserve. Similarly, when scientists do traditional biodiversity surveys, we count the species previously recorded in an area and look for changes. But we haven’t tended to consider the species that could grow there – but don’t. Many plants have been declining so rapidly they are now threatened with extinction. What did we do? To get a better gauge of biodiversity losses at smaller scale, we worked alongside scientists from the international research network DarkDivNet to examine almost 5,500 sites across 119 regions worldwide. This huge body of fieldwork took years and required navigating global challenges such as COVID-19 and political and economic instability. At each 100 square metre site, our team sampled all plant species present against the species found in the surrounding region. We defined regions as areas of approximately 300 square kilometres with similar environmental conditions. Just because a species can grow somewhere doesn’t mean it would. To make sure we were recording which species were genuinely missing, we looked at how often each absent species was found growing alongside the species growing at our chosen sites at other sampled sites in the region. This helped us detect species well-suited to a habitat but missing from it. We then cross-matched data on these missing species against how big the local human impact was by using the Human Footprint Index, which measures population density, land use and infrastructure. Of the eight components of this index, six had a clear influence on how many plant species were missing: human population density, electric infrastructure, railways, roads, built environments and croplands. Another component, navigable waterways, did not have a clear influence. Interestingly, the final component – pastures kept by graziers – was not linked to fewer plant species. This could be because semi-natural grasslands are used as pasture in areas such as Central Asia, Africa’s Sahel region and Argentina. Here, long-term moderate human influence can actually maintain highly diverse and well-functioning ecosystems through practices such as grazing livestock, cultural burning and hay making. Semi-natural pastures preserve many different plant species. Pictured: the Hulunbuir grasslands in Inner Mongolia, China. Dashu Xinganling/Shutterstock Overall, though, the link between greater human presence and fewer plant species was very clear. Seemingly pristine ecosystems hundreds of kilometres from direct disturbance had been affected. These effects can come from many causes. For instance, poaching and logging often take place far from human settlements. Poaching an animal species might mean a plant species loses a key pollinator or way to disperse its seeds in the animal’s dung. Over time, disruptions to the web of relationships in the natural world can erode ecosystems and result in fewer plant species. Poachers and illegal loggers also cut “ghost roads” into pristine areas. Other causes include fires started by humans, which can threaten national parks and other safe havens. Pollution can travel and settle hundreds of kilometres from its source, affecting ecosystems. Our far-reaching influence can also hinder the return of plant species, even in protected areas. As humans expand their activities, they often carve up natural areas into fragments cut off from each other. This can isolate plant populations. Similarly, the loss of seed-spreading animals can stop plants from recolonising former habitat. What does this mean? Biodiversity loss is not just about species going extinct. It’s about ecosystems quietly losing their richness, resilience and functions. Protecting land is not enough. The damage we can do can reach deep into conservation areas. Was there good news? Yes. In regions where at least a third of the landscape had minimal human disturbance, there was less of this hidden biodiversity loss. As we work to conserve nature, our work points to a need not just to preserve what’s left but to bring back what’s missing. Now we know what species are missing in an area but still present regionally, we can begin that work. The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Animals
Climate
Conservation

Are Blue Zones a Mirage?

The age detectives are fighting.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket CastsDo you want to live forever? How about to at least 105? You’ve probably heard of blue zones—amazing places where people live disproportionately longer and healthier lives. From Okinawa, Japan, to Ikaria, Greece these regions of the world have captured the imagination of an aging world.Most of the advice that researchers have extracted from these places are what most people consider just common sense. Don’t stress too much or eat too much or drink too much alcohol. Make sure to eat plants and legumes, build community, and protect familial relationships.But while this might be fine advice, at least one researcher is skeptical that the underlying research holds up.On this week’s episode of Good on Paper, I talk with Dr. Saul Newman, a researcher at the University of Oxford and University College London, who seeks to debunk the blue-zones research with studies of his own. His critics accuse him of writing a “deeply flawed” paper, keeping the debate active. (You can read their arguments here.)Newman’s argument is pretty straightforward. The documentation certifying people’s births is really hard to verify, and there are many documented cases of age fraud. Some of that fraud is intentional—people claiming to be older than they are for cultural or financial benefit—and some is unintentional, thanks to shoddy recordkeeping or researchers getting fooled or making mistakes.While this debate rests on methodological questions that we can’t fully explore in this episode, Newman’s provocation raises important questions about how much we should trust some of the most popular ideas in longevity research.The following is a transcript of the episode:Jerusalem Demsas: According to Our World in Data, in 1800, not a single region of the world had a life expectancy longer than 40 years. By 2021, the global average life expectancy was more than 70 years. It’s still not enough. We want to live longer, healthier lives. What can we do about it?You’ve probably heard of “blue zones,” regions of the world where researchers claim to have found disproportionate numbers of people living into their hundreds. The first such Eden was Sardinia, Italy. Then Okinawa, Japan, and Loma Linda, California, among others.But in recent years, despite the prevalence of cookbooks and diets and Netflix docuseries about these places explaining how to learn from the lifestyles of people living in these regions, something hasn’t quite added up.My name’s Jerusalem Demsas, I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.Saul Newman is a longevity researcher at the University of Oxford and the University College London who has become convinced that this research doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. First, when he looks at the regions of the world designated blue zones, they just don’t look like particularly healthy places. The blue-zones theory claims that people live longer in these regions because of their naturally healthy lifestyles, but what Saul finds when he looks at these regions is low literacy, low incomes, high crime, and even short life expectancies relative to the national average. But even more tellingly, according to his research, introducing official birth certificates suspiciously coincides with a steep 69 to 82 percent fall in the number of people claiming to be over 109. A number of other statistical oddities indicate that the people claiming to be over 100 years old are either misleading us or are misled themselves.Here at Good on Paper, several of the studies we discuss are preprints, which means they haven’t finished going through the formal review process that can take years. We do this because waiting to discuss studies until after they’ve been through that process would mean missing out on tracking important live debates. But I say all that now because, while Saul is convinced of his findings, this is not yet a settled debate. The proponents of blue zones are fighting back and claim he “omits or misunderstands” how rigorous their methods are.But to hear his perspective on the science of longevity and why he doesn’t trust the blue-zones research, I’m excited to have Saul joining us today.Saul, welcome to the show!Saul Newman: Pleasure to be here.Demsas: So why do people die?Newman: Why do people die? Well, this is a fascinating question, and many of the people in aging research sort of still admit that we really don’t understand the fundamentals. So it’s actually a surprising thing that something so obvious is something we’re still figuring out. The best approximation we have at the moment is that we look at the inverse question: Why continue to live? What is the sort of evolutionary advantage of continuing to live?There are two main thoughts. One I favor, and another that’s quite out of date. The out-of-date one is this sort of Darwinian idea that we exist just to make children. And this is the idea that has the problems, because if we exist just to make children, you get stuck with all sorts of awkward questions, like why does menopause evolve? Why evolve not to have children? Why evolve to help other people at the cost of your own reproduction? And we know all these things happen, and they happen across the animal kingdom, which brings us to the second idea.And the second idea is that we evolve to pass on genes. And because we are related to so many different people, there are a lot of ways to pass on genes, including indirect ways where we help others. This is a sort of still-developing field in answering that question of why we exist, essentially. And it’s a very exciting one because it can explain things like the evolution of menopause, where we’re taking care of grandchildren.But it can also potentially explain a lot of traits that are very difficult to analyze. Traits like homosexuality don’t make sense in this sort of cruel, hard Darwinian sense of, Oh, you’re just a baby factory. But there is a potential to explain them using inclusive fitness. I mean, that said, there was also the flip-side argument to that: Why do I need to justify myself in terms of evolutionary theory in order to exist? Well, of course you don’t. So it’s a very difficult debate to get through, but it’s also an open question at this point.Demsas: What exactly is happening, though, when you die? Let’s say you don’t get an illness, right? Like, we know what happens when someone dies of a stroke or has a heart attack or has cancer or some other kind of long-running illness. But if you are just a generally healthy person—you’re in your 80s, or you’re in your 90s—what’s happening to your body?Newman: It is slowly degenerating, in functional terms. So this is, you know, often very hard to measure, because you have to define what the function of your body is to say, you know, how it’s degenerating, but there are sort of obvious signs. So your metabolic function declines with age. Obvious things, like your physical capacity to run a hundred meters, for example, declines with age. Mental capacity does decline, but it can be much slower. And you know, I think that’s really fascinating, because if you look at, for example, the rankings of top chess players, they decline, but they decline extremely slowly. But essentially, there’s this sort of general systemic decline as you get older in terms of how well you can function.Demsas: There’s a paper that I know that you wrote about this idea of, you know, as you get older, of course, your likelihood of death increases as you age. But there was a hypothesis that perhaps at a certain point, the rate at which you were likely to die kind of leveled off. So if you made it to 80, if you made it to 90—yes, your likelihood of dying every year was still, you know, elevated relative to a younger person, but it no longer was increasing significantly. What happened with that hypothesis?Newman: Well, this touches on the best way we have to measure age and aging, and the sort of functional decline is increases in the mortality rate, because once you hit about age 40 or 35, your odds of dying double at a sort of fixed clockwork rate.Demsas: Wait—what year was that?Newman: Around 35 to 40. It depends a little bit because—Demsas: Okay, great. Just logging that. (Laughs.)Newman: Yeah. It starts to decline earlier, but it’s obscured by something called the “accident hump.” And this is basically, like, what you do when you’re a teenager, right? There’s a big bump in mortality caused by, you know, cars running into trees or jumping off of buildings into swimming pools or whatever it happens to be. But this clockwork doubling means that your mortality, your odds of dying, double usually around every eight years, and there’s really nothing we can do about that.We can change the baseline, but every eight years, your odds of dying will double and double and double until you reach old age. And so in old age, there’s a hypothesis that mortality rates stop getting worse with age, and therefore that aging rates kind of stop or at least slow down considerably. Now, it doesn’t mean that things are getting better. You end up in this sort of Russian-roulette scenario where it’s a “see if your odds of dying flatten out.” And essentially, you’re playing Russian roulette every three months in terms of your mortality risk.And what does that mean in terms of human lifespan? So it means something very interesting. It means that there’s no actual limit to how long you can play roulette without losing. You know, there’s a probabilistic sort of cap where eventually you are going to lose.Demsas: Yeah, unless you’re the luckiest person alive.Newman: Exactly. So there’s nothing per se ruling out a run of good numbers. But the problem here is that this idea is something that has been fought over for 50-odd years and has not been resolved, because it may be that your odds of dying do keep doubling and doubling and doubling until they hit the odds of dying that equal to one, right? So this is what I call the “maximum survivable age.” And it’s not clear to scientists which of those two was correct—whether we strike a maximum survivable age, where we can’t possibly live older than this age, or whether we reach a sort of grim Russian-roulette scenario.Demsas: But life expectancy has improved remarkably over the 20th century. I mean, we’re seeing, you know, people with average lifespans of late ’70s in many developed nations, and rates of child mortality have declined significantly. So it seems like there’s a lot that policy, development, changes in public-health strategies can do to improve lifespan.Is it your sense that—I mean, you just kind of brought up this idea of a maximum survivable age. Is it your perception that there is a number—there is a threshold at which, despite all of these things that you can do to make yourself healthier, to make yourself better, the genetic selection that might exist over generations, there’s just not a chance that humans are gonna live to be 300, 400, etcetera?Newman: Well, in 2016, I waded into this debate because, like I said, there are two sides. And one of the sides had published an idea that there was this hard limit to maximum lifespan. And they published it in one of the most elite scientific journals there is. And I realized they had made colossal mistakes in their analysis—really just fundamental mistakes. They had rounded off most of their data to zero. They had accidentally deleted everyone who died in May and June, and just really made a complete mess of it. But they had argued for one case, and this case was that there’s a limit to how long you can live, a single limit.I had another group come along and argue the opposite. Now, the opposite was this Russian-roulette scenario. The problem was that they had done something even worse, because they had taken everybody in Italy over the age of 105 and used them to build this sort of flattening-out curve. And when they had made this curve, they needed to say what it was flattening out from. So they needed to say, Well, what’s the normal midlife probability of death, and how fast does it get worse? What it boiled down to is that they had picked out the only estimate from earlier life-mortality models that gave them a flattening-out result.So they had 861 options, and they chose the only option that gave them a significant result. So here I was, in the middle of a very vitriolic and long-running debate, saying that both camps were wrong. And I think both camps are wrong, because if you take that maximum survivable age and you estimate it, it doesn’t converge to a single value mathematically. And so in plain language, what that means is that if you grow up in a different environment, your maximum survivable age is different. And it moves over time, really clearly moves over time. So there is not one limit to human life. There is, at best, a smorgasbord of limits that depend on where you grew up, what population you’re in.Demsas: So essentially, there is a maximum survivable age, but it will differ based on the environmental and policy choices that are being made at that time. And so I guess that then the question just becomes, like, how much can you really do on environmental factors?So I want to get to this question about this theory of blue zones, which I think has become very popular. I mean, there’s been, you know, a popular book, a Netflix docuseries. It has inspired tons of attention.There are regions of the world where people have claimed to live remarkably long lives—past 80, even past 100—at rates higher than you would expect just based on if it was just distributed normally: places like Okinawa, in Japan; Loma Linda, California; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Sardinia, Italy; Ikaria, Greece. What was originally the evidence for the idea that these places were unusually good for long life?Newman: Well, the original evidence was rather amusing, actually, because like everything else in extreme-age research, there’s only one data source for human ages, and that’s documents. You know, you have government documents or informal documents that say, I’m this old. But the amusing factor was that the first blue-zone study found a bunch of people within Sardinia that seemed to be living a long time. They didn’t measure anyone outside of Sardinia. They decided that this was a global outlier for extraordinary ages, and they thought that incest, that people sleeping with each other was making this island—Demsas: I’ve never heard this. (Laughs.)Newman: It’s extraordinary. It doesn’t make it to the documentary—Demsas: —to the Netflix docuseries. (Laughs.)Newman: —for a very good reason. Yeah. I mean, there’s nobody making this lifestyle recommendation, I hope. (Laughs.)Demsas: Dear God.Newman: It’s kind of amazing. And that was the start of the blue zones.So, you know, I sort of vaguely knew about this idea while I was getting involved in this fight between the plateau people and the people who think there’s a limit to human life. And, you know, I sort of thought of it as an amusing aside, but as time went on, it became less and less amusing, more and more concerning—like, starkly concerning. And the reason is that everything in these studies is based on looking at documents and saying, Oh, they’re consistent.Demsas: You mean, like, birth certificates?Newman: I mean birth certificates. So there are a lot of problems with that, that really came out of the woodwork over time because, you know, it’s on paper.But when I started looking into these extreme-age cases, it really snowballed. Everything snowballed in a way that completely destroyed the idea and the underlying data of the blue zones. And effectively, you know, people are just believing their own fairy tales here. This really, you know, goes beyond cases, though, because early on in the investigation, I discovered that Japan, where it was claimed Japan had among the world’s best evidence for birth records. And in 2010, it turned out that 82 percent of the people over the age of 100 in the country were dead.Demsas: And was it pension fraud, or what?Newman: It was not pension fraud. It was the remarkable fact that in Japan, the household has to register your death, and if you are the last person in the household and you are dead, how do you do that?Demsas: Oh, wow.Newman: So they had, like, literally hundreds of thousands of people who had died in World War II or had died subsequently, and who were just getting older on paper, including the oldest man in Tokyo and the oldest woman in Tokyo.Demsas: Were they paying them, like, Social Security?Newman: Oh, yes.Demsas: Like, what was happening? Where was the money going?Newman: Well, in the case of the oldest man in Tokyo, the money was going to the family. And he was an extraordinary case that kicked off this investigation because—so there’s a sort of week in Japan where there’s a respect for the aged [day], and in preparation, city officials in Tokyo had gone looking for the oldest man. And eventually, they found out that the oldest man was in Tokyo, but he’d been dead in his apartment for 30 years, and his family were living in the apartment. And the oldest man in Tokyo had been steadily collecting his pension checks.Now, what’s extraordinary about that is that his paperwork was perfectly in order. Like, if you handed their paperwork to a demographer, they would not be able to see anything wrong with it. I mean, it’s not like you die and automatically a form pops out in the central bureaucracy, right? There’s no actual way to know.So it turned out that most extreme-old-age data was undetected errors, and this happened in every blue zone.Demsas: So you went through all the blue zones and saw the same pattern?Newman: I went through all the blue zones. The same thing happened. In Greece, at least 72 percent of the people in Greece who were over age 100 were collecting their pension checks from underground. And what’s remarkable about that is they had just passed a government audit, despite being dead. They passed a government audit in 2011, and in 2012, the government turned around and said, Actually, all those people were dead.Demsas: So walk me through this a little bit, because I think there’s a few different arguments that you’re making here. One is that there are places where it’s quite difficult to know what’s happening with the population, because there’s [a situation] like what you mentioned in Japan, where the reporting of death is happening in a method where you actually can’t validate, when the oldest person in a household has died.And then there’s a second strand of things, which is that people are actively committing fraud because of pensions and Social Security or other sorts of welfare benefits. And then there’s a third, which is just that these documents are not consistent or good, and so when demographers are trying to do this kind of research, they’re ending up having to rely on pretty shoddy documentation or to make broad claims.So how much of this is happening in each place? Like, what do you think is most prevalent?Newman: We don’t know what’s most prevalent. I mean, this is actually part of the problem: that we can see when an error has happened, but if we have documents in front of us that look good, we don’t know if they’re in error or not. And this pattern repeats itself. So there are many, many ways. There’s a whole layer cake of different methods by which you can screw up someone’s age.Like you said, you can just write it down wrong at the start. There was a case where the world’s oldest man was actually just his younger brother, and they just swapped documents. It’s completely undetectable, and it’s happened three times. And there are other cases where there’s active pension fraud. I mean, there’s also cases where you just have someone who is illiterate and has picked up the wrong documents. The list goes on and on and on.But the point is that demographers keep validating these people, and then decades—or even in one case, a century later—find out that they aren’t who they say they are. And that process is pretty much random. So you have to ask yourself, you know, what happens to a field over the course of more than a century when the data can only be checked for being consistent? You can’t actually tell if it’s true?And I think it really set up this extraordinary disaster where not only are the blue zones based on data that doesn’t make sense; we actually have this sort of fundamental problem in looking at the oldest people within our society. Blue zones are an exemplary case of this, but it’s more general.So to give you an example, health in the blue zones was poor before, during, and after they were established. Even in America, at least 17 percent of people over the age of 100 were clerical errors, missing, or dead—at least 17 percent. Many of them just did not have birth certificates. And we have no way of knowing. Like, it’s not as if I can take a person into a hospital, and they can put them into a machine, and it tells me how old they are.Demsas: Cut their arm off and count the rings (Laughs.)Newman: Exactly. The old pirate joke. You cut the leg off and count the rings. You can’t do that.Demsas: Yeah.Newman: And that means we are just taking all of this evidence at face value. Normally, that would be fine. Right? And this is where I’m going to apologize for talking numbers. But this is a theoretical result I came up with in 2018.Let’s imagine you have 100,000 people who are 50, really 50. Like, they’ve got their documents, everything. And then you have an extraordinarily low rate of error in which you take 100 40-year-olds, and you give them documents to say they’re 50. If you do that, normally you’d expect, Oh, I can just ignore this. My statistical model will take care of it as noise. But something happens instead that is extraordinary, because those 40-year-olds are, like I said, less than half as likely to die than the real data. So your errors have a lower rate of dying and being removed from the population than your real data—Demsas: Wait—sorry. Can you explain that? I don’t understand.Newman: So you remember: I told you about the clock where your mortality rate doubles every eight years? That means if, let’s say—and I call them “young liars.” If my young liars are eight years younger, their odds of dying day to day are half. So the errors have half the mortality rate of the real data. Every eight years, the percentage of errors doubles, and by the time you get to 100, every single person or almost every single person is an error.So you can’t ignore these tiny error rates. It doesn’t matter what country you’re in. It doesn’t matter where you are. You can’t just pretend they don’t exist, because they build up in this weird, nonlinear way over time, and it means that you would actually mathematically expect all of the oldest people in the world to be fake. So, you know, I’ve published this in a scientific journal. No one’s ever been able to argue the math, but they do not want to face up to sort of the repercussions of this.Demsas: Yeah. Part of this is very familiar to me. I don’t have a birth certificate. I was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and the only document I have about my birth and parentage is a baptismal certificate, where I’m pretty sure it was filled out by a member of the church that I was baptized into. I’m not joking: It’s written in teal ink.We were asylum seekers here. I’m, like, taking this to the State Department. I’m like, I swear to God, my father is my father. You literally have to give me a passport. I’m a citizen here. And it was such—it was awful. It was such a hassle. And then—now I’m getting off topic here, but—my brother had to get a DNA test to prove that our parents were his parents in order to get his driver’s license eventually, and his passport. So I’m very familiar with this.And there’s another phenomenon—which, I mean, I don’t know if this is something that you’ve seen in your research—wherein some cultures and communities, of course, being older is, like, quite an advantage. And so there will be people who you’re like, I know how old you are, but you are telling everyone you are 10 to 15 years older than you are. Have you seen this in your research?Newman: All the time. Yeah, I mean, constantly. There was a study in the BBC a couple of months ago where they looked at heart age. And this is a National Institute on Aging–funded study on people in the rainforest, right? And they say, We don’t have any idea how old we are. And the headline is, Oh, these people have really young hearts for their age. You know, they don’t know their age. They’re literally telling you, We are making it up.And, you know, if you have any doubts about the blue zones, there used to be something called the “longevity zones” that predates the blue zones. It was put out by National Geographic in exactly the same way. It had exactly the same hallmarks of, Oh, you live in a mountainous region that’s very remote, and you eat yogurt and vegetarian diets.And it was exactly what you’re saying. These people gave status to village elders, so people were inflating their ages to an extraordinary degree. They were saying, I’m 122. And that’s all it was. You know, this was three regions across the world: Soviet Georgia, where apparently yogurt was the secret; the Vilcabamba Valley, in Ecuador; and the Hunza Valley, in Pakistan. These were the blue zones, and every single case was based on rubbish recordkeeping. And, you know, it just seems to be that’s exactly what’s happened again.[Music]Demsas: After the break: Even if blue zones aren’t real, does that really change how we think about living longer?[Break]Demsas: The thing I’m wrestling with when I engage with this, because, you know, you have published this work; you’ve written about it in the Times and other places. But the fundamental idea that there are locations that are better for people’s lifespans seems not overturned by this, right?Like, we know that location matters a lot for health outcomes, air pollution in particular. It feels like there’s a new paper every other week showing that there’s massive impacts of air pollution on life expectancy, on cognitive functioning, on general health. Is the fundamental concept that there are certain places where people are going to live longer still one that we should be putting more research into?Newman: I think that’s not controversial. But I also think it’s very well understood, for exactly the reasons you say. There’s a study every week on average life expectancy. And what’s striking about this is that those places are very different from the places that get extreme life expectancy.So I basically took a sample of 80 percent of the world’s 110-year-olds and most of the world’s 105-year-olds, and looked at their distribution within countries. So I’m sitting in London right now. And in all of England, the place with the best rate of reaching 105 was the single poorest inner-city suburb with the single fewest number of 90-year-olds.So those two things—where it’s good to live, on average, and where it’s good to reach extreme old age—were exactly the opposite. This is like saying Flint, Michigan, is the healthiest place in the U.S.A. No shade on Flint, Michigan. The government is really the cause of this, but it does not make any sense. It fundamentally doesn’t make any sense. And it gets even worse when you start looking at the details.So the single U.S. blue zone is Loma Linda. I mean, the CDC measured Loma Linda for lifespan. They measure it, and it is completely and utterly unremarkable.Demsas: I’m not, you know, deeply reporting in the longevity space here, but the way that you have talked about your interactions with some of these authors makes me think it’s an especially contentious field. Why has it kind of remained so difficult to sort of overturn this popular narrative around blue zones?Newman: Well, it makes a lot of money.Demsas: Yeah.Newman: It’s really that simple. I mean, there are multiple best-selling cookbooks, you know. And I’d like to point out, of course: Don’t take your health advice from cookbooks. Its really sort of needs reinforcing every now and again. (Laughs.) But, you know, if you really had a cure for aging, you’d be winning the Nobel Prize.Demsas: You wouldn’t be writing a cookbook? (Laughs.)Newman: You would not be writing a cookbook. You wouldn’t be on late-night television, you know, making a sales pitch. You’d just be like, I want my Nobel Prize. I have a cure for all diseases. Where’s my money? It’s really fundamental.But there is another aspect to this in that a lot of research careers are built on examining the oldest old, and even more research careers are built on just assuming that birth-certificate ages are correct. And to show that they’re not correct in an undetectable fashion on such a massive scale threatens a lot of people’s research careers.Demsas: But part of the thing that I find interesting about the blue zone’s recommendations is that a lot of them are things that are just straightforwardly good advice, right? Move naturally. Have a sense of purpose. Stress less. Don’t eat too much. Eat beans and legumes. Have community. Put your family first. The only one that I think is potentially not actually good is: Drink alcohol in moderation. But the rest of them are generally associated with good health to different extents and, you know, with longevity to different extents.I guess, like, what drove you to become so interested in pushing back on this narrative, given that the advice that people are getting is generally still, like, you know, good health advice? Like, you probably should do most of these things if you’re not already.Newman: Well, I think the problem is the way in which the people in these regions are really kind of culturally being exploited. Because they don’t bear any connection to what actually happens in the blue zones. And I think that was what really drove it home for me, is that you have this sort of flavor of some guy who turns up for a few weeks, looks around, decides it’s the ikigai, and goes home. And if you actually go to the government of Japan, they’ve been measuring Okinawa, for example, since 1975. And every single time they’ve measured Okinawa, it has had terrible health. It has been right at the bottom of the pile.Demsas: Wow.Newman: I’ll take you through some statistics that were robustly ignored by people in selling these blue-zones ideas. Body mass index is measured in Okinawa and compared to the rest of Japan, and it’s measured in over-75-year-olds. So if you go back to 1975, that’s people born 1900 or before, and they measure how heavy they are. They have been last every year, by a massive margin.And then you look at the next claim. So that sort of knocks a hole in the “move naturally” claim. The “move naturally” claim also has this sort of idea that people grow gardens in the blue zones, right? The government of Japan measures that, and they are third to last out of 47 prefectures, after Tokyo and Osaka, where everyone lives in a high-rise. They don’t grow gardens. And we’ve known that since the beginning of records.And then you look at the idea that they eat plants. It seems really noncontroversial. But people in Okinawa do not eat their veggies. And we know this because we ask them. They’re last in the consumption of root vegetables, last in the consumption of leafy vegetables, last in the consumption of pickled vegetables. They’re third from the top in other raw meat. You know, they eat 40 kilograms of meat a year, at least, which is way above the global and national average. And even sweet potato—sweet potato is on the front of the Netflix documentary, these purple sweet potatoes—they are last for sweet potato consumption out of all the 47 prefectures of Japan.Demsas: Wow. Okay.Newman: And they always have been. There’s another idea that, you know, they have a sense of belonging, that they belong to a faith-based community. They’re 93.4 percent atheist. They’re third to last in the country, and it is a very atheist country. So the problem is that none of these claims have any connection to reality whatsoever.Demsas: Yeah.Newman: And it’s been sitting in the open for decades.Demsas: Have you become a lot more cynical about scientific research as a result of this?Newman: Oh, I mean, absolutely. It’s extraordinary, the sort of cognitive dissonance that goes on. And really, I mean, all of these claims just have no connection to reality. And you see this sort of sad thing playing out with the locals, where a beach resort will get built. People will fly in for three days, and they’re still sitting there going, like, Why don’t we have a hospital? Why are we all still poor?You know, just basic social problems get overlooked because of this. So yeah, it has made me much more cynical, because these, I guess you would call them “lumps and bumps,” should have been obvious right from the point when someone said incest was good for living a long time.Demsas: So, like, I mean, preregistration helps reduce a lot of issues in social science. There’s also been increasing attempts to subject, you know, big findings, important findings to replication by various groups and individuals.I mean, is there something fundamental that you think needs to happen differently in terms of how reputable journals accept new findings? Do you think that all the data needs to be open? What needs to happen here to prevent these sorts of problems in the future?Newman: In short, the answer is: really a lot.Demsas: Yeah.Newman: The slightly less short answer is that the core of science is reproducibility. It is the core idea. And these results are not reproducible. And it’s not just that they’re not reproducible. After 20 years, nobody has published the underlying data. And there needs to be a much heavier emphasis on replication in science and on testing claims—especially profitable claims—before they’re just thrown out into the open.Because, you know, I find it amazing. This is something that was discussed at an elite level at the World Economic Forum. Now, we cannot have a cookbook-based piece of lifestyle advice governing global health. So we need to really rejig the—I mean, first, the level of skepticism in science needs to go up considerably. And second, we need to really start hitting back on papers that need to be retracted, papers that need to be removed from the scientific record because they do not replicate or because, you know, like the first two—the studies I pointed out here—because they’re based on extremely questionable choices.Demsas: So most people listening to this will have heard of this topic before, but have you found anything that indicates it’s been especially influential in public health in that policy makers are taking it quite seriously as a way of trying to push different nonvalidated recommendations?Newman: Yes. I mean, the presentation at the World Economic Forum is really a low point, an extraordinary low point. But I think what is, like I said, more troubling is that you have an entire machinery of public health here that didn’t spot how completely wrong this is. In retrospect, it’s so wrong that everybody’s sort of giggling. But it’s been 20 years of this being perhaps the most popular idea in demography.And so I get worried about this because I’ve just completed a new study. And in this new study, I have taken every single 100-year-old in the world and analyzed where they’re from and what countries attain the age of 100 at the highest rates. And to do this, I took United Nations data contributed by every government on Earth, in good faith, with the best efforts at data cleaning—both by the governments and by the UN. And the places that reach 100 at the most remarkable rates don’t make any sense.Malawi, which is one of the 10 poorest countries on Earth, is in the top 10, and it’s in the top 10 routinely. You know, Western Sahara, which is a region that does not have a government, is one of the best places in the world for reaching 100, according to the UN. I mean, that’s fundamentally absurd. And it’s fundamentally absurd that it has been 70 years that this data has been produced for, and nobody has noticed the absurdity. And I find that deeply shocking.Puerto Rico was one of the top 10, and that initially passed muster. You’ve got a place in a rich country that has a long history of birth certificates, until you realize that this is one of the best places in the world for reaching 100, and the reason seems to be that the birth certificates are so badly documented that they restarted the entire system in 2010. They said, Birth certificates are no longer legal documents. They threw it all out and started again because of systemic levels of error.Demsas: Wow.Newman: And that’s how you reach 100.Demsas: Yeah.Newman: You just write your age down wrong. And you know, there is this sort of public-health element that is deeply troubling because you are one of the people in the world that doesn’t have a birth certificate, and you’re not alone.Demsas: Yeah.Newman: A quarter of children now don’t have a birth certificate—a quarter of all children. And we are just ignoring that.Demsas: I want to take a step back because I think that even though I think that this is deeply troubling, there is still a desire—I mean, part of the reason why there’s such a focus on this issue is people really want to figure out how to extend their life. Every year they get older, they’re, you know, deeply concerned with yoga, with protein intake, with lifting weights. A lot of different things begin to occupy your mind as the number turns to 3, 4, 5 at the beginning of your age.I want to ask about how much we know about the role of environmental versus genetic factors in determining longevity. Is all of this effort to try and tweak our life expectancy—is it really that worth it, or is it largely just a question of your genetics kind of determining what your life expectancy is going to be?Newman: I mean, there’s good news and bad news. And I’ll start with the bad news. The bad news is—well, it depends on your perspective, I suppose. The bad news is that the people who live the longest, on average, are born into rich countries with free health care. It’s that simple. The good news is: When it comes to the environment, it plays a big role, a very big role in how long you live. And there is a lot you can do about it, not a single one of which costs any money, right?So I’ll break it down. The simple things that we really know about lifespan: Don’t drink. There you’ll get, it depends, but if you [weren’t] going to get addicted, you’ll get about an extra 30 years of lifespan over what you would if you got addicted to alcohol. And for context, the CDC estimates that that’s about the same as heroin addiction. But if you drink without getting addicted and give up drinking, you’re still going to gain roughly three to four years.Demsas: Wow. Okay.Newman: Right. So that’s simple.Don’t smoke: You’ll gain about seven years. Do some exercise: You’ll get probably—it depends how much you exercise, but let’s say four years. And go to your GP, and that’s it. You don’t need to buy the cookbook.I think the reason the cookbook sells so well is that those three things are somewhat difficult, right? They’re kind of hard, and I think this is why longevity cures perennially do so well, is that they’re always easier than those three things. Almost always, you know, the ones that do well. And that is what underpins this market. But if you really want to live a longer time, just don’t drink; don’t smoke; do some exercise.Demsas: Well, tell me a little bit more about the genetic factors here. I mean, there was a study I saw that looked at 20,000 Nordic twins born in the late 1800s, and found that genetic differences had negligible impacts on survival before about age 60, but after age 60 and particularly those reaching their 80s and beyond, genetic factors become more important. I don’t know if you’ve seen that paper or if you’ve seen other research about this, but what do we know about the role of genetics in longevity?Newman: I haven’t seen that paper, but I’ve seen some extraordinarily bad papers on the roles of genetics and longevity. There’s just something called a genome-wide-association study, where you effectively say, you know, what genes are associated with extreme longevity. And I’ve seen that conducted on sample sizes of less than 200 people, which is, I mean—it’s a bit like saying you’ve got a space program when you let go of a carnival balloon. It’s a joke.So I would be extremely skeptical of longevity claims. You know, there is just this fundamental problem with our documents that if you go into that study and dive into that study, you’ll realize that they, like everybody else, have to trust what is written down on the piece of paper that says how old these people are.And there’s no way to check that. You know, I think we’re on the edge of a situation where you can. There have been some extraordinary scientific advances in estimating people’s age, but nobody seems to want to face up to that fundamental problem yet.Demsas: Well, Saul, this has been fantastic. Always our last and final question: What is something that you thought was a good idea but ended up being just good on paper?Newman: I’ll tell you something that turned out to be bad on paper in the moment. When I was an undergrad, it’s kind of like someone said to me, Go to the best U.K. university. It’s the one in Oxford, Oxford Brooks, which is not the University of Oxford. They told me completely the wrong university to go to, and I’d gone to it. And so to sort of crawl my way out of this hole, I found out that my university offered an exchange program to the Ivy League. And it was the first year they’d run it. So they just didn’t understand how much it was gonna cost.Demsas: Okay.Newman: And I was like, Great. I could be the poorest kid in the Ivy League, right? So I went on exchange, but without me knowing it, they realized how much it cost and pulled my visa status after the first six months. So I wound up in the FBI building in L.A., you know, in a locked elevator, going to one of the rooms for an interview, just completely not knowing that I’d overstayed.Demsas: Is that even a good on paper? That just sounds like you got screwed.Newman: Yeah. I mean, yeah, it’s as close as I got. I mean, it was good on paper right up until that point.Demsas: Yeah. What school were you going to?Newman: I was going to Ithaca—Cornell, in Ithaca—and paying, I think, $1,000 a semester in student loans.Demsas: Oh my gosh. That is, like, one of those things where you really gotta check to see if that deal’s going to pan out.Newman: Yeah, I think it worked out long term, but short term, yeah, not so great.Demsas: Well, this was great. Thank you so much for coming on the show.Newman: Thank you very much. It’s been a real pleasure.Demsas: If you like what you heard on today’s episode, I have a suggestion for you! My colleagues here at The Atlantic are exploring how we talk about aging, in our newest How To series. You can hear a trailer at the end of this episode, and then go subscribe to How to Age Up, coming April 7, wherever you listen to podcasts.[Music]Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Dave Shaw and fact-checked by Ena Alvarado. Rob Smierciak composed our theme music and engineered this episode. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

Animals
Culture
Forests

Don’t Think Too Hard About Gum

When you chew gum, you’re essentially gnawing on plastic.

At the turn of the 20th century, William Wrigley Jr. was bent on building an empire of gum, and as part of his extensive hustle, he managed to persuade the U.S. Department of War to include his products in soldiers’ rations. His argument—baseless at the time—was that chewing gum had miraculous abilities to quench thirst, stave off hunger, and dissipate nervous tension. But he was right: Scientists have since found that gum chewing can indeed increase concentration, reduce the impulse to snack, alleviate thirst, and improve oral health.Perhaps that’s why people around the world have had the impulse to gnaw on tacky materials—roots, resins, twigs, blubber, tar made by burning birch bark—for at least 8,000 years. Today, gum is again being marketed as a panacea for wellness. You can buy gum designed to deliver energy, nutrition, stress relief, or joint health; scientists are even developing gums that can protect against influenza, herpes, and COVID. Ironically, this new era of chewing gum is manufactured with a distinctly modern ingredient, one not usually associated with wellness: plastic.By the time Wrigley began his business venture, Americans had grown accustomed to chewing gum sold as candy-coated balls or packaged sticks. The base of these chewing gums was made from natural substances such as spruce resin and chicle, a natural latex that Aztecs and Mayans chewed for hundreds if not thousands of years. Unfortunately for 20th-century Americans, the chicozapote trees that exude chicle take a long time to grow, and if they are overtapped, they die. Plus, cultivated trees don’t produce nearly as much chicle as wild trees, says Jennifer Mathews, an anthropology professor at Trinity University and the author of Chicle. In the 1950s, chicle harvesters began struggling to meet demand. So gum companies turned to the newest innovations in materials science: synthetic rubbers and plastics.Today, most companies’ gum base is a proprietary blend of synthetic and natural ingredients: If a packet lists “gum base” as an ingredient, that gum most likely contains synthetic polymers. The FDA allows gum base to contain any of dozens of approved food-grade materials—substances deemed either safe for human consumption or safe to be in contact with food. Many, though, are not substances that people would otherwise think to put in their mouth. They include polyethylene (the most common type of plastic, used in plastic bags and milk jugs), polyvinyl acetate (a plastic also found in glue), and styrene-butadiene rubber (commonly used in car tires). The typical gum base contains two to four types of synthetic plastics or rubbers, Gwendolyn Graff, a confectionery consultant, told me.Everything we love about gum today is thanks to synthetic polymers, Graff said. Polyvinyl acetate, for example, strengthens the bubble film. “If you blow a bubble, and it starts to get holes in it and deflate, that’s usually an indicator that it doesn’t have polyvinyl acetate,” Graff said. Styrene-butadiene rubber creates a bouncy chewiness that makes gum more likely to stick to itself rather than to surfaces like your teeth. Polyethylene can be used to soften gum so it doesn’t tire out your jaw. Gums with only natural polymers “can feel like they're going to fall apart in your mouth,” Graff said.Plastic gum, though, also falls apart, in a way: Gum chewing has been linked to microplastic ingestion. In a study published in December, U.K. researchers had a volunteer chew on a piece of gum for an hour, spitting into test tubes as they went. After an hour of gum chewing, the saliva collected contained more than 250,000 pieces of micro and nano plastics—comparable to the level of microplastics found in a liter of bottled water. In a study presented at a recent meeting of the American Chemical Society (which has not yet been peer-reviewed), a graduate student’s saliva contained elevated microplastic levels after she chewed several commercially available gums, including natural ones. The research on gum chewing and microplastics is still limited—these two papers effectively represent analysis of just two people’s post-chew saliva—but gum chewing has also been correlated with higher urine levels of phthalates, plastic-softening chemicals that are known endocrine disruptors.Scientists are still learning about the health impacts of microplastic ingestion, too. Microplastics find their way into all kinds of foods from packaging or contamination during manufacturing, or because the plants and animals we eat absorb and ingest microplastics themselves. As a result, microplastics have been found in human livers, kidneys, brains, lungs, intestines, placentas, and breast milk, but exactly how our bodies absorb, disperse, and excrete ingested plastic is not very well studied, says Marcus Garcia, who researches the health effects of environmental contaminants at the University of New Mexico. Some research in mice and cultured cells hint that microplastics have the potential to cause damage, and epidemiological research suggests that microplastics are associated with respiratory, digestive, and reproductive issues, as well as colon and lung cancer. But scientists are still trying to understand whether or how microplastics cause disease, which microplastics are most dangerous to human health, and how much microplastic the body can take before seeing any negative effects.The answer could affect the future of what we choose to eat—or chew. Ingesting tiny plastic particles might seem inevitable, but over the past 10 years or so, Americans have grown understandably fearful about bits of plastic making their way into our food, fretting about microwaving food in plastic containers and drinking from plastic bottles. Gum has, for the most part, not triggered those worries, but in recent years, its popularity had been dropping for other reasons. In a bid to reverse that trend, gum companies are marketing synthetic gum as a tool for wellness. Just like Wrigley, they are betting that Americans will believe in the power of gum to soothe nerves and heal ailments, and that they won’t think too hard about what modern gum really is. For anyone worried about swallowing still more plastic, after all, gum is easy enough to avoid.

Animals
Business
Chemicals

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