Ep. 95: Your Health & Environment with Ken Cook - Writer, Lobbyist, President & Co-Founder of Environmental Working Group

Ken Cook is President & Co-Founder of the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to protecting human health and the environment. Ken is a dear friend of ours, and has been a lobbyist for over 20 years. He has written dozens of articles, op eds, and reports on the environment, public health, and agriculture in the US. Under his leadership, EWG has been carrying out its mission of health and wellness since 1993. On their website, you can find helpful tools like the “Clean 15” and the “Dirty Dozen” to discover which foods to buy organic, learn about the water in your area using their Tap Water Database, and overall finding advice and tips for healthy living.

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Show Notes

[3:26] I mean, I started with me and, you know, an assistant. And now we have about 70 people and scientists and database programmers, people who are really trying to figure out ways to translate the best available science to help you live healthier lives, to empower you to live a healthier life in a healthier environment.
[4:20] It's a privilege to see what everyone there makes happen every day, whether it's helping people be smarter, more thoughtful about the foods they eat, how they clean their homes, their personal care products and so forth.
[5:42] A big part of what we do is trying to make information actionable to people, give them the small steps that give them the wins, the victories to take the next steps, right?
[5:57] You want people to take charge of their lives and take those steps they can to both make progress and feel empowered.
[6:47] Everything we must do is environmental in nature to cope with this problem. Social distancing, that's an environmental step. Wearing a mask is taking a protective action.
[7:13] We are intimately related to our environment, that we can't entirely keep the environment at bay. No matter where we live, no matter how we live, there's a connection.
[7:40] In pursuing good health, you want to interact with the environment around you in a thoughtful, smart way.
[8:19] If you're looking for a silver lining, it's that recognition that we're all creatures of our environment. This is one case where the environment jumped out like most pandemic's, animal initiated another species. It hops to ours. And before you know it, we realize just how closely we are intertwined with our environment in ways we would never have imagined.
[8:52] It's also important not to feel like you have to do everything perfect or everything at once.
[9:32] I would jump in with food, to be honest. I would look to that. It's every day. It's multiple times a day. You have lots of opportunities to challenge bad habits and form new ones.
[11:10] It's more important for us at EWG to get people feeling empowered and on that path of learning and forming new habits and having these sort of personal environmental wins than it is to be perfect, because none of us are perfect.
[14:06] All of the additives, the flavorings, the colorings, the fillers, all the textureizers, the thousands and thousands of ingredients that are allowed in conventional processed food. Almost none of them are allowed in organic.
[14:32] Sometimes one flavoring compound gets a black eye in a study or from a regulator and some other compound pops up in its place that we don't learn about for ten more years.
[15:01] The organic sector is still growing considerably faster than the conventional one, which basically grows at the population rate, whereas organic growth is usually two or three or more times that fast because people want it.
[16:31] Solar power, electric batteries in combination, wind power is revolutionizing and threatening the status quo and energy. Organic is doing the same with agriculture.
[16:57] If we're empowering people to lead healthier lives in a healthier environment and you're taking that action, the other changes that we're fighting for now is as important as what we're fighting against.
[22:13] We feel like people should have a right to know what's in their food with respect to GMOs.
[23:57] They're sending a signal back through the supply chain from the fork and the spoon that is being read by the food companies and then the grain traders and right back to the farmers. So I think we can knock out some of the main dietary exposures just by consumer action.
[24:14] The empowerment that you bring to making your life healthier and your family's life healthier begins to reverberate in the economy, right?
[24:59] When your father signed that bill and my dear friend Bill Reilly was standing right next to him when he signed it, the EPA administrator at the time, I do think that it took some courage for him to do that, to say the very least. There was a lot of opposition, including in his inner circle in the administration. He listened to Reilly and a few other voices and he signed that bill, but I do think that that began to trigger sort of an ideological divide and a partisan divide that's been unfortunate since then because people didn't want to see a Republican president signing of environmental law.
[25:59] Now that consumers have this power to make things happen. The way change occurs is very different. It's not science coming forward, government making changes, industry complying and consumers benefiting. Now it's science coming forward, consumers seeing it, acting on it.
[26:48] Now it's that science-consumer connectedness and interaction that's driving things.
[28:56] I think people are starting to form new patterns of work and travel for work that could really endure.
[31:21] It's tough to find that silver lining right now. But finding balance between work and home life, it's been thrown into fresh relief.
[33:35] Well, let's try and help people make a smart choice about if they're spending their scarce dollars for organic, which fruits and vegetables should they try and buy organic.
[34:26] Then we went the other way and said, OK, well, what about people who can't find or afford organic, who can't do private school for food, which fruits and vegetables that are grown conventionally and tested by USDA show up as having pretty low pesticide levels?
[35:38] To us, it was more important to move directionally in the right way, as opposed to say that until you get to that destination, nothing else matters. No, it is the journey that matters.
[36:26] We learn from the Dirty Dozen that giving people something that they could build on and feel positive about was really in sync with those learning moments to give people a sense of victory.
Thank you for joining us on Health Gig. We loved having you with us. We hope you'll tune in again next week. In the meantime, be sure to like and subscribe to this podcast, and follow us on healthgigpod.com.

“In pursuing good health, you want to interact with the environment around you in a thoughtful, smart way. “ - Ken Cook
“It's more important for us at EWG to get people feeling empowered and on that path of learning and forming new habits and having these sorts of personal environmental wins than it is to be perfect, because none of us are perfect.” - Ken Cook
“Now that consumers have this power to make things happen, the way change occurs is very different. It's not science coming forward, government making changes, industry complying and consumers benefiting. Now it's science coming forward, consumers seeing it, acting on it.” - Ken Cook

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