Hello. I'm Donna Eacho. I'm the former board chair, current treasurer and a board member of Less Cancer, and it's my great pleasure today to chat with my friend Don Beyer. Don is the US Congressman representing Virginia's 8th District. He's had a wonderful career first as a successful businessman, as lieutenant governor of Virginia, and as President Obama's ambassador to Switzerland and Lichtenstein. We're so grateful to have you with us today, Don. Thank you. Donna, it's always fun to be with you. We had many great plans for this coming year and so many have been accomplished. I want to congratulate you and thank you for your leadership on so many of these items. The first one I want to talk about and one that Less Cancer was particularly excited about was the great leadership on PFAS legislation. I wondered if you wanted to just comment on that a little bit and all the good that's going to do for our country. I'm really excited about it. We've put together the PFAS Congressional Taskforce that I'm part of with many others. Donna, one of the best parts about this PFAS legislation is it is bipartisan. The big piece of legislation is co-sponsored by two Michigan Congress people, Debbie Dingell, a Democrat and Fred Upton a Republican. Basically it's a bunch of PFAS bills that have been introduced over the years rolled into one. But it establishes a national drinking water standard for this dangerous class of chemicals. It appropriately designates them as dangerous surely for the first time. That gives EPA the right to be able to step in and regulate it. It classifies it preference future industrial discharges of PFAS. Just overall, we've narrowed so many of the potential cancer-causing agents in our environment over the years, the ones we know about, but this will be the really next big step forward. Because there's bipartisan in the house, one of the things I discovered is when they started partisan the vote breaks down that way, it was for a 223-212, but when it seemed to be a bipartisan people working together, it ends up being 400-20. That's so great. Just everybody jumps on board, which also means there's so much better chance of getting them to stop. One of the things for our work that's exciting is that people recognize the importance of taking action that prevents cancer. In addition to the great work we do and researched for curing it, really taking some action steps to prevent it in the first place is so important. It's so great to see both sides of the aisle involved in that. By the way, piling on with that, I'm still very proud that our US smoking rate is under 15 percent right now. I think only Australia is better than us of the 200 plus countries in the world. They're only one that has a smaller percentage of its population smoking. When I was growing up a generation before you Donna, it was a half of them smoked. I remember my mum and dad's friends died from heart attacks all the time in their 40s and 50s. You rarely see that anymore. We've come a long way, and it's not just heart attacks, but obviously lung cancer. I think this is one of great public health accomplishments worldwide and certainly in my lifetime, it's really been astounding. The other great thing that has been accomplished and I'd like for you to speak to in the infrastructure bill is all the effort to improve the water systems. The initial hope in the infrastructure bill was to be able to fix the lead in every pipe all the way to your kitchen sink or your bathtub. I think because it got scaled down in the Senate. It still does every main waterline basically to, I don't know if it's just to the curb, but is really significant replacing all the lead line pipes in America. You have to just Flint disaster. After we've seen all the evidence about what taking even small amounts of lead will do to a child's cognitive development or to an older person's ability to withstand dementia for much longer period of time. It's really important that we get the lead out. As a kid, my dad would always drive to the [inaudible] Amoco station. They had in Northwest DC that served unleaded gasoline. I'm not quite sure that he was sent to it on a cancer basis, but he knew that the unleaded was to be better for his beloved engines. But it's certainly better for us. That's great. The next thing I wanted to talk about a little bit is the Build Back Better Plan, which I know is not completely enacted yet, but it seems to be on its way in some form. I wondered if you would talk a little bit about what public health initiatives are in there. The one that caught my eye because they're not directly related to cancer prevention, but they're quite a number that I think could address obesity, but I know you and I have talked about that in the past around diabetes, but it's also, as you probably know, one of the leading predictors of cancer. Just before we touch on Build Back Better approach, there's a great essay, maybe in the New York Times last week about Gary Taubes's most recent work. Gary is the author of The Case Against Sugar. My friends in the sugar industry are not fans, but it's a very powerful book that I read a couple of years ago that argues that sugar is among the most addictive substances in the world. You give sugar to a baby, or a dog, or a horse, or anything else, and they'll come back craving for it. We try never to give the dog any sugar because it'll follow you around the house the rest of your life looking perhaps for some more. What this recent essay does, is it challenges again the notion of the input-output model of weight, gain and loss. That if you take it in 2,000 calories and you only burn 1,800, you're going to gain weight and take in 2,000 [inaudible] to lose weight. Yet we know lots of people who weigh way more than they would like to. They don't eat any more than the skinny people among us. That there's a lot more going on than simply what they call this the calorie balance theory. That's relevant given how many people are overweight, obese in America today. That's just the 68 million that are prediabetics. But as you say that they're at much higher risk of all kinds of different cancers. To getting our hands around the nutritional correction, which at this point seems to be largely about eliminating carbohydrates processed foods. It can go a long way to preventing the cancers. Is there a role for government in doing that? If so, how would that play out? Well, it's tough, you get what Mayor Bloomberg tried in New York City by prohibiting big soft drinks. By the way, one of the things in Tob's book, he said that, and I may have the number shrunk by five percent, but in 1900, say 120 years ago, Americans took in about 13 pounds of sugar a year. Now we take in about 130 pounds a year, per person. Roughly half of that comes in sweetened drinks. Wow. Giving up those big, whatever they call those things from the 7-Eleven that are that big, can go a long way to get rid of that sugar. Do you envision any legislation that could encourage that? I know this has always been a touchy point, but is there a way forward on that? Donna it's really tough. We just see how we are with vaccination mandates right now or mask mandates and how much they're resisting. It becomes this huge political or philosophical divide. In the case of a vaccine, it's directly, are you going to die or not? I mean, it's like one-in-a-million right now. If you're vaccinated the only one-in-a-million chance of dying from COVID. Virtually the 1,000 people that are dying a day right now, almost all of them are unvaccinated. To do something that might affect you 10 or 20 or 30 years away. I think, well, we can do really as nudge it. Some of it could be tax policy, where we have cigarettes, but a lot of us been trying to set the right examples. Make sure that the government through the USDA is getting the right information out to us. Lots of fruits, lots of vegetables, very few processed foods. Taking good care of ourselves. Are there any nutritional elements to the Build Back Better plan, perhaps with the expanded pre-kindergarten or? The biggest thing on the nutritional, there's a lot in there. But the biggest three things, I think we're just increasing the affordability of health insurance. It's gotten pretty expensive, so they've done a lot to extend the premium subsidies. They're going to cut about $800 a year from the cost of the premium; the Affordable Care Act. Forty-eight percent of the new consumers are paying $10 or less per month, which is really big. A second big thing is those states that refuse to expand Medicaid. You all know that when they expanded Medicaid in Virginia, it added 550,000 people to the insured roll. There are a bunch of states that haven't done, but what now? Because they're afraid they didn't have the money, so we put that into Build Back Better act. We're actually funding the Medicaid expansion. Of course what that means is, when you're going to the doctor, when you can afford to go to the doctor, you need health care. You know some of you can say, "Hey, I don't want to lose 10 pounds or 20 pounds," and he'll how you can do it. Then all the prescription medicines. We finally have a start to getting the cost of medicines way down, making sure they can't increase faster than inflation. On diabetes medicine now insulins, maximum $35 per month. There's all kinds of pieces of this that are giving people better health care, which hopefully will lead them to better nutrition. Donna, maybe the single most important piece of this is, we realized that the section on health care that is most neglected is primary care doctors. We've lots of wonderful specialists. Our med students are attracted to the specialties because, well, for a lot of reasons. Maybe more interesting, gives more money, maybe better hours. But it's these primary care doctors that make sure you're doing the things year-in year-out. That are going to keep you healthy for the long run. Well, and that's a great way for us to end our conversation today because one of the important roles that Less Cancer plays, is in educating medical professionals in order for them to then be able to pass on prevention techniques and advice to their patients. In fact, the little conversation we're having today is part of the broader cancer prevention day workshop, which will be streamed live and taped obviously combined. But then also lives on on Coursera as continuing medical education credits for people who want to watch that. That's really our mission and we appreciate all your support, both with our workshop and everything you do for Virginia and the rest of the country and Congress. Donna, we've come so far in our lifetimes, in terms of preventing cancer and healing the cancers that do occur. Thank you for your leadership in Less Cancer, to keep pushing us hard in that direction.
