Food processing isn’t listed on the nutrition facts food label. The label tells you what’s in the food. Critics say this is mostly irrelevant—what you really need to know is what’s been done to the food, and no label tells you that.

In this program, Dr. Robert Lustig will explain nutrition and food science. He says that essentially, all you need to know are two precepts, six words total:

1) protect the liver

2) feed the gut

Those foods that satisfy both precepts he deems to be healthy; those that do neither are poison, and those that do one or the other are bad (but less bad)—no matter what the USDA and FDA allow to be stated on the package. Only items that meet both of Lustig’s criteria qualify as real food—i.e., that hasn’t been stripped of its beneficial properties and sprinkled with toxins that will hasten our demise.

Dr. Lustig addresses the Commonwealth Club

Dr. Robert H. Lustig is professor emeritus of pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco. He specializes in the field of neuroendocrinology, with an emphasis on the regulation of energy balance by the central nervous system. His research and clinical practice has focused on childhood obesity and diabetes. Lustig holds a Bachelor’s in Science from MIT, a Doctorate in Medicine from Cornell University Medical College, and a Master’s of Studies in Law from U.C. Hastings College of the Law. He is also on the faculty for the International School for Food Addiction Counseling and Training (INFACT).

Lustig has fostered a global discussion of metabolic health and nutrition, exposing some of the leading myths that underlie the current pandemic of diet-related disease. He believes the food business, by pushing processed food loaded with sugar, has hacked our bodies and minds to pursue pleasure instead of happiness; fostering today’s epidemics of addiction and depression. Yet by focusing on real food, he says we can beat the odds against sugar, processed food, obesity and disease.