The Terrifying Link Between Diet & Mental Health - Max Lugavere (4K)

Gavin Newsom signed Bill 418, which will prohibit any food containing brominated vegetable oil, potassium bromate, propyl paraben, and red dye three. California becomes the first US state to ban Skittles and 12,000 additional products for cancer-causing additives. What's going on?

It's hard to, uh, take a firm stance on this because on the one hand, I do think it's largely virtue signaling and perhaps a bit of fearmongering. You know, California is kind of known for doing that. A lot of products that are sold in California, for example, like coffee, and- and a product as innocuous as instant coffee has to come with the warning label that it contains acrylamide, a compound that, in vitro at least, is a, is a known carcinogen, right? You can like find this on instant coffee sold in California, um, it's not uncommon to be in a parking garage, for example, and see a sign in, uh, li- eh, you know, by the elevator or staircase that the, by being in the parking garage, you're gonna be exposed to chemicals known to cause cancer and that are, you know, teratogenic, birth, uh, defect causing. So California is known for being a bit of a hypochondriac state, um, and, uh, and so that's where I think a lot of this comes from. On the other hand, I am... I'm not a fan of big government, I'm a fan of small government and less regulation as opposed to more, but I do kind of think that where regulation is perhaps warranted is in with regard to the food supply, the food system, because if you let the market decide, you end up with things like Mountain Dew flavored hot dogs, which we've seen go viral on social media-

You're kidding me.

... or yeah, I mean, these are (laughs) it's unclear whether or not these were real or computer generated, but I mean, you see all the time, you, you know, there's like all kinds of crazy products in the supermarket that are just, you know, their sole intent seemingly is to hook consumers onto this addictive, hyper-palatable, hyper calorie-dense product. Um, you see it in fast food all the time. I mean, uh, I'm not sure what country I was in, but I was walking around and there was like a glazed doughnut hamburger that some mega chain was offering somewhere. Um, so like if you let the market decide, the market is ultimately gonna cater to what the people want and people don't have like stop gaps, you know, they just...

All roads lead back to Haribo Tangfastics or something.

Yes. There you go. Exactly. Those, those kinds of products. So I do think that a little bit of regulation, uh, is important and I think, you know, this, this perhaps is a step in the right direction because we know that the food supply is e- essentially toxic. We live in a world now where 73% of items in your average supermarket are ultra-processed. This is according to a new study that came out that used a machine learning algorithm that looked at all the products available to your average consumer in your average supermarket, and the vast majority of them are ultra-processed, which we know has been linked to every poor health outcome imaginable these days. So, you know, when, when banning or at least regulating these kinds of products, which at the end of the day ultimately are proxies for ultra-processed foods, like you're not gonna find red dye 40, right, in something that mom cooks.