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This is Wall Street Week.

I'm David Weston, bringing you stories of capitalism.

Much of Wall Street joined the rest of New York this week heading to the polls to elect a new mayor.

We explore what Mamdani's win means for the financial capital of the world, and specifically for real estate in the Big Apple Plus.

RFK Junior says pediatricians are making out like bandits by pushing vaccines on children.

We tell the story of why the business model is having the opposite effect and driving doctors away from ministering to the young.

And everyone's looking for more protein in their diet.

We explore the booming business of protein supplements and whether they're more than just another diet ad.

But we start with this week's big Supreme Court argument over whether President Trump can keep those tariffs he imposed on much of the world.

Jennifer Hillman of the Council on Foreign Relations takes us through what it could mean for the President to lose.

I think what's really at stake most of all, is whether or not the President has violated the Constitution, Because again we have to go all the way back to the founding of our country.

You know, no taxation without representation is on that license plate on everybody in the District of Columbia.

And what it really is saying is the Constitution gives to the Congress, not to the President, the power to impose taxes or tariffs.

The Constitution gives to the Congress, not to the President, the right to regulate foreign commerce.

So the issue is, how is it that President Trump can now start to impose all of these tariffs again, this huge increase in taxes on Americans without the kungs.

The customerty explicitly gives to Congress the authority imposed tariffs.

Yes, can Congress delegate that authority and has it in this statute?

Right?

And so the issue that is really before the court is whether or not the Congress has handed over this power that it has.

It has the power to impose tariffs or duties or taxes.

Did it grant that authority hand it over to the President through the passage of this law, the International Economic Emergency Powers Act.

And the decision will largely turn on one phrase in this IEPA statute, the phrase that says that the Congress delegated the authority to regulate importation or exportation.

And so the issue is can you read the word regulate to be the same thing as tax or tariff?

And the argument that most people are making, that many members of Congress, that many of the business groups, and many of the others that say the answer to that question is no, No, Congress did not hand over the authority.

Point to the fact that nowhere in this IEPA statute does the word tariff or duty appear.

If the Supreme Court upholds what the President's done, then is clear what happens we keep charging the tariffs.

What if it actually strikes it down?

What is the remedy if in fact the court rules that these tariffs were illegal or unconstitutional.

So if the court rules that the tariffs were illegal from the get go, then then the tariffs must be refunded to those that have paid them.

And if we look, you know today through at least the end of August, that means about eighty eight to one hundred billion dollars worth of tariffs would need to be refunded to the importers that paid those tariffs in the first instance, because if they're unlawful, then everyone is entitled to a refund with interest.

Is there a mechanism for doing that.

That sounds like an enormous undertaking.

There is a mechanism, but you are correct.

It is an enormous undertaking.

And it basically splits out into whether or not the particular import of this particular item in this particular shipment, whether or not all of the paperwork that Customs has to do about those has closed or not.

In the end, does all of this really matter?

And we've heard f administration they have alternatives.

I mean, you know the numbers better than I do.

Section three zero one, Section two O one, section three three seven.

They have a lot of different routes that they can impose various regulations and tariffs under.

Yes, And again, I do think it's very clear that the president loves tariffs, and so I think if the stream court strikes down these tariffs, I do think you will see the President take up a number of these other laws and try to reimpose tariffs.

But for me, there would be a pretty important distinction between them.

First of all, with the one exception of the statute that's called section one twenty two that would allow the president to declare that there is an emergency because we are experiencing a major balance of payments problems or currency difficulties that would allow the president to impose a fifteen percent across the board tariff on goods from every country limited to fifteen percent and limited to one hundred and fifty days in length, unless the Congress renewed it.

All of the rest of the authorities that the President could turn to are going to be different than what he's done.

In the normal course.

We will likely get it at ruling for the Supreme Court either later this year or sometime next year, on this important question.

At the same time, sometimes the Court likes to, is a word, duck the problem.

What are the roots available the Supreme Court, such as, for example, there's a dispute over subject matter jurisdiction, What are the chances of this spot say, you know what, we don't need to decide this, We'll remand it for further proceedings.

That can happen to me if the Supreme Court is going to try to take a little bit of an off ramp, a little bit of a compromise.

And again, I think you've clearly seen the Chief Justice try to find is there some comise.

I think the compromise there may be in whether or not the Court rules that there is no authority to do tariffs ever under IEPA, or whether the Court takes, as it's a little bit of an off ramp, a view that IEPA permits some tariffs, but potentially, for example, not the trade deficit tariffs.

I mean, the Court could, in essence say, we could read this word regulate importation to permit some tariffs.

But what the President did in imposing this worldwide tariffs as a result of the trade deficit, he cannot do because the Congress has given him this separate authority under Section one twenty two.

The one thing that I think ought to give the court real pause about interpreting this phrase regulate importation or exportation is the fact that it is well established as a matter of law that you should read a word to have the same meaning.

Within the statute and in our Constitution, there is is a ban on putting tariffs on exports.

And the phrase within IEPA is regulate importation or exportation.

So what the Trump administration is asking the Court to do is to read that phrase regulate imports means tariff imports, but don't tariff exports because that would be unconstitutional.

And so they're asking the court to read that word regulate to have two entirely different meanings in the exact same phrase of the exact same statute.

And that, at least to me, is a very tall order.

So when I step back from it and say, you know, how likely is it that the court is going to say, yes, Trump, you can do this, I think the answer is I think they're going to say no.

And I think they're going to say no, largely because there are other statutes in which the president can impose tariffs.

He doesn't need to twist and bend and torture this IEPA phrase in order to impose tariffs.

And secondly, it is really hard to see how you read this one word regulate as having diametrically opposed meanings in the exact same phrase of the exact same statute.

And yet that's what the Trump administration is saying that the court should be doing.

The IEPA case is foremost one of law, but it could have enormous consequences for businesses and consumers.

Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers says the economic argument in favor of tariffs is hard to make.

Look, I think the tariffs are unwise economic policy.

I think on net, they push up prices.

On net, they take money out of the hands of consumers, which slow the economy down.

And they're, in that sense, a self inflicted supply shock that makes the Fed's job, makes everybody in the economy's job harder.

So I think they are for the most part bad policy.

I don't think we use them successfully to get important other benefits from other countries.

And so the world will be better.

The United States in particular will be better off.

Indeed, the American manufacturing sector will be better off without these tariffs.

The two magic words in the statute extraordinary and unusual, it says, is what we need to do to declare this national emergency?

That is at least largely a factual question.

How extraordinary or unusual are these balance of trade deficits which the President voked as an economist, How unusual are these trade deficits?

I mean, I want to be fair, David and recognize that there have been a lot of emergencies to find over time, for a lot of different purposes, not all of which would be the kind of thing that, if they happened in my family, we would call an emergency.

So we do need to pay attention to the statutes and the history as well as that, and that's what the lawyers do and what the Supreme Court will deal with.

But if you ask, is the United States in some kind of unprecedentedly disastrous situation of borrowing that is related to a lack of tariffs, the answer is absolutely not.

If you ask the question, according to economics, are tariffs the right response to a foreign borrowing emergency?

If there was a foreign borrowing emergency, the answer is no.

The right measures would involve reducing the budget deficit, increasing the country's level of savings, for example.

So I think it's pretty difficult to say that there's some aspect of the economic situation that's present today that hasn't been present for most of the last twenty five years that would justify the invocation of emergency.

However, we got here.

We certainly have a large and growing deficit and debt.

One of the arguments that President Trump is making is these tariffs are helping us with that.

It's bringing in revenue to reduce that debt and deficit.

Just on that limited issue, is he right?

The tariff certainly are bringing in revenue, not nearly as much as he said they would, And I don't think the forecasts the administration makes that they'll get a trillion dollars of revenue over the next year or two are likely to pan out.

But yes, they are bringing in revenue, but they are also having other effects.

They're holding interest rates higher than they would otherwise be.

They are also slowing the economy, and those things make the deficit position worse.

So I'm not sure that there's an important improvement in the budget deficit as a consequence of these tariffs.

And certainly, if you think of the budget deficit as some kind of emergency, these tariffs would be a very odd response to that kind of emergency.

Coming up What Mayor Memdanni could mean for the business of New York and particularly a real estate business that was showing signs of coming back.

This is a story about turnarounds, for better or for worse.

This week, New York City elected its next mayor, Zora Mundani.

Will take office on New Year's Day, with promises of big changes to come.

The future is in our hands.

The business community is kind of taking a wait and see attitude.

He's a new phenomenon until he won the primary election in June.

They really didn't know or care who he was.

He was an anonymous assemblyman.

Catherine Wilde is the president and CEO of Partnership for New York, a group that represents businesses in the city.

The fact that what they say is which you hire a thirty three year old kid to run a three hundred thousand person business, And the answer is no.

But this is politics.

He's been elected mayor and so now the question for the business community is how to make sure he's successful and that the city thrives under his leadership.

And there are two parts of being successful.

One is what he wants to do, and one is whether he can do it.

Start with the first, because this is a really tough place to run.

As you know, what does he need to be able to effectuate whatever he wants to get accomplished.

Well, he wants to make the city more affordable, and he equates that to lower price of groceries, universal childcare, free buses, and he talks about freezing the rent.

When it gets to all of those issues, obviously, the question is how you accomplish them.

If you try and do it by raising taxes, which he's talked about, then the affordability crisis just gets worse because the cost of rising taxes is passed along to businesses, who pass them along to consumers, and all New Yorkers will pay.

So we've got to find some better solutions.

I was encouraged last night in his acceptance speech when he was announced as the mayor elect with fifty plus percent of the votes.

The first thing he started with, and he never mentioned raising taxes last night, he started with, well, I'm going to make a more efficient government, and that business likes to hear.

One of the things we have in this country's ability to vote with your feet, to actually leave and go someplace else.

To one of the questions we're asked more often than either, is it likely that particularly some of the more wealthy members of the business greegue will actually leave for other places like Florida?

What do you think?

I don't think it's likely.

I mean the real question is will we be able to continue to attract top talent to the city.

I mean, New York is a place that people want to be.

There's a lot of benefits to being in New York, and as long as people don't feel they're being abused and taken advantage of demonized.

The biggest challenge right now for us is really that other states and countries are competing for our jobs, for our tax dollars, and we have to show that New York is again a reasonable cost place to do business and to live.

The premium in the financial industry, the premium for somebody doing the same job here in New York or doing it in Tennessee or Florida or Texas is more than twenty percent, that more than employers have to pay for talent to have a comparable lifestyle in New York.

That's pretty big delta.

Mister Mimdani was elected in no small part on his pledge to make New York City more affordable, particularly when it comes to housing and other real estate, including a promise to freeze the rent for the two million New Yorkers living in rent stabilized apartments.

There are a number of things we can do to get the cost of rent down, the cost of building operations down, I should say, and he has said, and has amended his original oversimplified one liner, freeze the rent.

I said to him months ago.

How do you freeze the rent if you can't freeze the costs and we had a discussion about how thirty percent of the rent is real estate taxes, and he subsequently amended his comments to say, I understand that real estate taxes on rental housing have to come down, and said I will be the mayor who reforms property taxes.

Now, that is good news.

That will help the rent stabilized units, of which there are over a million in New York City, and so that's a lot of tenants that will benefit.

A mandate for a city we can afford.

And a mandate for a government that delivers exactly that.

I think Mam Donnie's brilliance is he has tapped into something that New Yorkers are frustrated by and really care about, which is costs.

It's expensive to live here, particularly housing is expensive.

I have young adult children in New York that are dealing with this.

Owen Thomas is the CEO of b XP Properties, the largest publicly traded developer, owner and manager of premium offices in the United States.

In terms of what he's trying to do, which is bring down costs, you know BXP myself, we'd be fully aligned with that goal.

We would welcome it and would like him to do it.

I think the issue is some of the policies that he describes on how he wants to do that, I don't think are the right ones to accomplish the objective.

So, for example, putting in rent controls.

If you put in rent controls, that is going to prevent private capital from coming into the market and building the housing that's going to be required.

New York needs hundreds of thousands of housing units.

That capital is not going to come from the public sector.

It has to come from the private sector.

So the government needs to put in place some incentives and rules to allow that private capital to come in and fund these projects.

And if that's done, I think it can be very successful.

Building new apartment buildings is one way to get the price of housing down.

Another is to take some of the under used office buildings and convert them to residential.

After the pandemic, offices inside some of the most iconic buildings in the New York City Skyline have remained vacant.

Some developers say that's where they see an oppertunity.

There's a very broad spectrum of buildings that are out there.

There are brand new Douba buildings, and like you said, they are doing extraordinarily well.

But there are also buildings that are older but are loft like that are in places like Soo or Tribeca or Union Square.

It's a lot about location, it's a lot about the physical qualities of the building.

It's a lot about the owner of the building and if they've upgraded them or added amenities.

So the office market is a spectrum.

One of two light walls that we created, which go twenty five stories down in the building.

Brian Steinwurtzel is the co CEO of GFP.

His firm is behind the conversion into rental apartments of JP Morgan's former headquarters just off Wall Street, so.

We are at twenty five Water Street.

It was a one point one million square foot office building that was designed to look like an IBM punch card, so it had very few windows around the building.

And what we bought this building at the end of December twenty twenty two and we turned it into one three hundred and twenty apartments.

We did this by removing most of the brick on the outside of the building and carving two lightwells into the building, and that allowed us to create all of these apartments, and it also allowed us to take that extra floor area and build ten stories on top of the building.

We had a very ambitious plan when we bought the building and where we feel very fortunate that it's come to fruition.

Steinwerzel was early to the conversion business.

Now the pipeline of conversions totals eighty one million square feet as of May, up from seventy one million square feet just months ago.

An incentive called four to six seven M gives developers like GFP a tax brick for taking on the capital intensive challenge of converting offices into apartments.

What that says is is, if you start a conversion of an office building to residential, I think the project has to break ground by the middle of twenty six.

If you do that, you can have a tax abatement for thirty years.

And as a result of that rule and the over supply of office there are about thirteen million square feet of office buildings today in New York that are being converted to residential.

So I think that's a terrific example of the private sector and the public sector working together on a plan.

And these conversions are perfect right.

We certainly need less office, we need more housing.

The city ultimately will get more tax revenue, there's more vibrancry, there's more affordability, and there's less of an environmental impact by basically reusing a building as opposed to tearing one down and building one from scratch.

And I hope this program will grow.

Now.

One thing that really helps with these conversions in New York is rents are so high, so you can put in the base building at a higher per square foot value and still have all the numbers work for a private investment, and that also helps.

But the local regulation definitely helps as well.

Although office to residential conversions could be a step in the right to that alone is not enough to take care of the problem.

Over the last decade plus, we recognize that we are not building enough housing in New York City.

And let's face it, we're very fortunate that people want to live in New York City.

This is a city that continues to grow.

There are more jobs in New York City now than there ever have been in the history of the city.

And so with all of these people that want to live here, we need to create more housing.

And the challenge is still in New York City, so it's very expensive to acquire land or buildings.

It's very expensive to build here and it's very complicated.

We have a lot of people that live in a very close proximity to each other, and so we need to be careful about how we build so that we're becoming part of the community and not upsetting it.

But with that recognition that we need to build more housing, there is much more focus on it and we're happy to be part of the solution to these New York City's problems of creating housing.

But we need a lot more than just converting office buildings to residential in order to solve this problem for our city.

Mayor Electmumdannie pledges to add thousands of apartments to New York City.

To have a hope of succeeding, he's going to need a good deal of help from those working under him in his new administration.

We're always waiting and seeing what a new administration does.

There are a lot of people that work in a city administration that make it happen.

Cutting the amount of time it takes to build housing is probably the one of the top things that they can do.

So putting people in office that are willing to empower their departments and their divisions to actually make decisions, to review plans to issue permits quicker.

Are going to be things that we'll be looking to see, or are they putting people in place that are looking to add regulation, to add obstacles or hurdles that will make creating housing more difficult.

Up next, If all of us care so much about the health of our children, why do we have a business model that's driving doctors away from pediatrics.

It turns out that the answer is not one that RFK Junior wants to hear.

This is a story about keeping the doctors away sometimes when we need them the most.

Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Junior claims that one of the reasons to be suspicious about vaccinations is that pediatricians are making a lot of money off of them.

There's a published article out there now that says that fifty percent of revenues the most pediatricians come from vaccines.

The claim is headline grabbing, but it's not backed up by the facts.

It turns out that far from being a profit center for pediatricians, vaccinating children is a loss leader, or maybe simply a loss.

I think it's really hurtful that the narrative around pediatricians profiting from vaccines continues to be put front and center.

Pediatricians actually have to work extra hard to make sure that they can have all the vaccines on hand in their clinic settings and to be able to afford that the.

Business of vaccination is particularly expensive, not only because doctors need to buy the vaccines to have them on hand, but also because of the equipment to keep them.

Doctor Ben Hoffman is a professor of pediatrics at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland and the past president of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Being able to procure, store, and deliver vaccines in a clinical setting is really complicated endeavor, and it requires resources within the clinical setting to order vaccines, whether it's from the manufacturer or a broker, or from the state that the practice has to lay out the money to purchase X number of doses of a vaccine, put it in storage, and over time hope that they will give enough of the vaccine so that they make back the money they spent.

So pediatricians stretch their finances to be able to have all those vaccines on hand for their patients, for the convenience, and because they know how important it is the cost.

Of buying and administering vaccines has been a pain point for years.

In a twenty seventeen study, twelve percent of pediatric practices and twenty three percent of family medicine practices reported that they stopped buying at least one vaccine because of the cost.

Doctor Sally Permar is pediatrician in chief at New York Presbyterian and chair of the Department of Pediatrics at wild Cornell Medicine.

So the field of pediatrics has really changed to the better of healthier children, fewer coming into the hospital, fewer with diseases that left them with just abilities and other illnesses, so that we know the value of vaccines, but we're left with cleaning up all of the misinformation that is really dominating the fields these days.

Even here in New York, we had over ninety percent of our families getting all of their shots by age five at this point, and even just in the last year, it's gone into the eighties, and it's putting not only our children at risk, but really all of us at risk.

The challenge of providing children with the health care they need goes well beyond vaccinations.

It's one piece of a larger picture in which pediatricians systematically are paid less on average than other specialists.

It actually is a tough job to keep a pediatric practice afloat.

Pediatricians are some of the lowest paid of all physicians.

In fact, they're paid thirty percent lower on average than that of adult specialists who had the same number of years of training the same amount of debt.

We know that the bigger system really does not value the health of kids in the way that it needs to.

Yet we're working to address child health in the field of pediatrics on a playing field that is completely rigged and set and exists to support the fiscal incentives around adult health.

What are those financial incentives that favor healthcare for adults over children?

First and foremost is the way that the federal government reimburses physicians for what they do.

Medicare pays providers like doctors and hospitals, typically less than private insurance, but typically substantially more than Medicaid.

Catherine Baker is provost at the University of Chicago, former dean of the Harris School of Public Health, and an expert in the economics of healthcare.

Medicaid is a partnership between the states in the federal government, and Medicaid reimbursement rates for physicians and hospitals vary a lot state to state, and that really affects whether patients who are covered by that insurance program have access to providers in that state.

That difference between Medicare and Medicaid translates into a difference between how much we pay for the healthcare of the elderly and the healthcare of children.

As of June, children comprise nearly forty eight percent of enrollment in Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program or CHIP.

Medicaid pays at about thirty percent lower for the reimbursement compared to Medicare, which is available to all adults over sixty five.

And in addition to that discrepancy, there is how we value healthcare, and in particular, preventative health care and even children's health care is often valued at a lower level, which translates into the reimbursement.

So, for example, a pediatric visit thirty minutes with your primary care provider to do things like injury prevention obesity prevention vaccines is valued about a tenth of a orthopedic procedure that may take the same amount of time.

The fact that Medicaid pays so much more poorly than Medicare translates both to payment that pediatricians receive from Medicaid but also from commercial insurance.

In most circumstances, commercial or private insurance will pay more for the same service than Medicaid will, and as a result, it can be challenging for a lot of pediatricians, especially if they're in private practices, to be able to balance their books if they're seeing a significant portion of patients who have Medicaid, just because the payment is so much less.

The disparity in healthcare between the young and the old, in reimbursement and in income can discourage doctors from suing the specialty of pediatrics.

If you're a medical student looking at the range of careers that you could have after medical school, you're going to put potential, salary, earning potential in that consideration.

And what has grown over time is of course our debt, not only starting at the undergrad level, but also at the medical school level.

So education debt can be in the hundreds of thousands for new physicians that are just finishing, and that would be the same no matter what specialty you're choosing.

So we are facing a pediatric workforce crisis that has been growing more severe over the last decade.

In fact, we've lost twenty percent of the number of US medical grads that used to go into pediatrics don't choose pediatrics anymore.

Beyond discouraging the next generation of pediatricians, the economics are also driving some out of the practice.

The jobs for the families are you here, so the income base is low and a lot of the families are on Medicaid services here.

Doctor Jill Neff had her own practice in southeastern Ohio for some thirty years.

I did close my practice and it took me two years to come to terms with the thought that I had to do it.

It's an extremely hard decision.

I feel like I am leaving them that they have nowhere to go, that they've depended on me.

And yes, many tears, many discussions.

It's extremely hard.

If the math of running a practice and getting paid for it isn't working well in cities, the problem is even worse in rural areas.

I did talk to one of my representatives a couple of years ago on this topic and asked him, you know, is there some way, some way at all of the government can help do this.

In his respect, was well that the communities need to come together and come up with the money themselves to pay these physicians to come there.

This town cannot come up with money to pay physicians to come here and pay off their hundreds of thousands of dollars a debt.

If we are committed to ensuring our children receive all the health care they need and deserve, what has to change.

Those who know best, the pediatricians, see a pressing need to reform the system.

They say there's a long way to go to live up to all that we say about caring about the future of the youngest among us.

So the first thing is advocacy.

We need parents, grandparents, people that were once children, and that is all of us to know about this and to talk about how this isn't the way that we think as a society.

We all value children.

We have children in our family that we are families and outside our families that we know and love, but they're not being prioritized in our health care.

And so one is just the knowing about the problem and advocating.

Then how can we at a time that we're seeing a lot of change in health care and how our government funds healthcare, and when we come out of this crisis that we're in as a government about health care, can we emerge with new priorities that includes investing in health at the earliest stages of life, for improving the trajectory of health across the whole lifespan.

So that's a big one to me, is the advocacy and what can we do with our policies.

But the next is shifting some of the priorities of how health care has always been funded.

Can we think differently about how compensation is determined so that we can have some high revenue earning areas spread to other areas that are more underfund So that's a harder one, but one that we should think of as hospitals and health.

Systems advocacy, changing the metrics, engaging not just the government but also philanthropy.

Reforming the system will be a tall order, but the stakes could not be higher.

One of the things I think is really important for people to realize is that while kids make up thirty percent of the overall population, they are one hundred percent of our future.

And I mean that in terms of our economic future and our security future.

Hobbling together something with the crumbs or what's left over from the adult healthcare system is not.

Going to work.

Up next.

There is no such thing as a free lunch, and when it comes to weight loss, drugs that lunch better come with extra protein.

This is a story about whether we can ever have too much of a good thing.

Everywhere we turn these days, it seems there's another way for us to get more protein into our bodies.

But how much do we need and why do we seem to need it?

Particularly right now?

Pop Tart's protein Yo, Why why do we need this high protein content protein drinks?

Everybody wants protein.

Protein is an essential macro nutrient, and macronutrient just means that we need it in large amounts from our diet to help us be healthy.

Jueva Barrow is a professor of molecular nutrition at Cornell.

We can get them from vegetables, we can get them from soy products, and then we consume that protein.

Our body digests them, and then we take the essential units of the protein, we call them amino acids, and then we use them for a host of biochemical reactions to keep our body healthy and to keep our body well.

Teen eighteen, Lulu Hunt Peter's book Diet and Health first popularized the idea of calories in the American diet and the practice of counting those calories as a way to keep healthy and fit.

Ever since, Americans have been trying to fill their plates with foods we think are good for us.

But that's constantly changing, and today Americans are eating more meat per capita than ever before.

According to the US Department of Agriculture, US meat consumption has increased by more than one hundred pounds per person since nineteen oh nine.

Brian Ernest is lead economist for animal protein at Kobank.

The fastest growing segments in the grocery store when we look at fresh is yogurt, cottage, cheese, and eggs.

These three things really have kind of a halo effect when it comes to health for the consumer.

Each one, I believe is seeing double digit sales at the grocery store here in twenty twenty five.

Specifically, things that have stronger protein composed to them, but also lend themselves very well to changes in flavor and fit a profile that accepts and adopts flavor profiles very well.

Animal protein in general has seen strong growth over the last couple of years.

If we look over the last ten years with the US consumer, chicken consumption has grown by nearly nineteen pounds, whereas beef and pork have been relatively studied.

We're saying very strong demand overall are affect our value added sales this year have been up versus last year, which is great opportunity for US, and that goes well beyond just Thanksgiving turkeys.

One of those sources of animal protein is turkey, and Jayjanrain is the CEO of Butterball, the largest producer of turkey in the US.

The iconic American brand has been in business since nineteen fifty four.

Butterball when only the best we'll do.

We know consumers are health conscious right now and there's a lot of focus on protein and turkey is naturally a good fit for that and fat, high end protein, and it's very economical source of protein as well, particularly during the holiday when you see product at about a dollar per pound, it's an incredible value for the consumer.

One of the things that we're seeing particular right now is a category that's real growth for US is our ground turkey business.

And some of that is just because more and more consumers are realizing the opportunity is to use ground turkey in their everyday meals.

But then also given the incredibly high prices in beef right now, it's a very good advantage for consumers who are looking for a ground meat product to use turkey instead of ground beef.

American consumption of protein from animals and other food sources is up, but so is the use of protein supplements from new companies like David Protein, maker of protein supplement bars.

It's co founder and CEO is Peter Rayha and our first.

Year we'll do one hundred and fifty million in sales, which I believe is the fastest growing food company, and next year we forecaster to three hundred million plus.

Before David Protein rehel founded our x bar, which he sold a Kellogg for six hundred million dollars in twenty seventeen.

Americans we keep jumping from different diet trends.

So first there was Atkins, then there was the paleo diet, then there was Whole thirty, and then there was a keto fasting.

Plant based had a moment, and if you look at the fundamental reason for those trends, and we drove them they are really around body composition changes or weight loss.

Every January, everyone feels like they need to get back in shape, and so you're looking for diet as a solution to that.

We don't want to be susceptible to those diet trends, and we wanted a position that was factual and around something that is true.

But do we really need all this protein?

Barro says that for most Americans, the quantity of protein itself isn't the.

Problem for the average American, and we recommend ten to thirty five percent of your total calories should really come from protein.

And so narrowing and that down to let's say a two thousand calorie diet, If ten percent of that needs to come from protein, that would be two hundred calories of my total protein needs should come from protein.

And then equating that to grams of protein, that would be about fifty grams of protein for the average American.

And so if you want to translate that to what that means in terms of food, if you eat a six pounds piece of steak, that's going to give you about fifty grams of protein, which is plenty for your protein needs for the entire day.

What explains the recent interest in protein and why is consumption on the rise.

Rayhau says, part of the answer is GLP ones.

For the first time, we actually don't have Americans going to a diet to those weight We have Americans going to a drug to this way, and so that's changed this whole entire pattern and how Americans are thinking about attrition.

Roughly eight percent of the US population is currently on a GLP one weight loss drug like ozempic Ormanjaro, a share that may grow after President Trump reached a deal with drug makers this week to make their weight loss drugs more affordable.

You mentioned drugs.

Glp ones are very much in the news right now.

Does that change protein needs?

So there's still a lot of ongoing research about that.

The emerging evidence that we're seeing is that there are some patients that take GLP one organists that experience lean muscle laws right, lean mass going down along with the you know, the fat loss and so the need so let's say, can we compensate that with protein levels?

And the rationale for why that happens is still under investigation, but in general, if you are losing lean mouse, we do want to replenish that make sure you're meeting your protein needs.

While they're looking to reduce the caloric intake, they may be looking to increase the protein as a portion of overall chloric intake.

So protein has lent itself very well to this, and we're starting to see products on shelf that are marketed towards users of GLP one and these are more inclusive of protein.

In general, GLP ones are changing our nutritional needs as a country, and Reyhau says that's welcome news for products like David Bar, which is a high protein, low calorie option that retails for around three dollars a bar.

So the big need we're addressing with our product is to deliver as much protein with the least amount of chloric impact.

How do you basically be a vehicle for protein without having a lot of consequences on both sugar and calories.

What is the sugar guntan zero zerograms of sugar and how much protein.

Twenty eight grams.

I think one of the biggest problems with protein is affordability.

If you're having a high protein diet, it's very expensive.

Turns out carbohydrates and fats are much less expensive as other protein options get more expense, if I think it makes our product's position more valuable.

You mentioned the steak can be expensive.

It's particularly expensive right now.

The price of beef is really going up.

Do you see that as affecting your marketplace position?

Yeah, I think it helps us because one of the ways we drive consumer surplus is if you just look at what it costs to get twenty a grams of protein, you know, in a steak or a salad, it's twenty thirty dollars.

In our product, it's three dollars and twenty five cents, so it's a tremendous value, and then there's no preparation.

You can just eat it.

As Americans consume more protein, they look increasingly for ease and convenience.

We're seeing the consumers reaching out for certainly our product and turkey in general, but they're also expanding beyond the whole bird.

We're seeing the frozen products that we have to offer.

We're seeing bone and breasts.

So oftentimes we'll find consumers who are buying a whole turkey and they're supplementing with more and other turkey products for their meal.

The David Bar uses EPG, a proprietary plant based fat component that has ninety two percent fewer calories than traditional bars, while still delivering a similar texture and flavor.

The people who buy and eat David bars, what are they eating instead of I.

Think they're using it as an addition.

So say you have an oatmeal breakfast, it's pretty absent of protein, so you can add it David on top of that and get your close to thirty grams of protein in a sitting.

So I think we're bridging the gap because it's very difficult to eat, say one hundred grams one hundred and fifty grams of protein a day, and so that's the problem where I think we're directly.

Solving supplements like a David bar will get more protein into your body, but is it the best way.

So there's a new exciting emerging concept that's known as nutrient sequencing.

So what it is is taking our existing well balanced diet right.

So I'm eating my right around amount of carbs, I'm eating my right amount of proteins, meeting my correct amount of fats.

But nutrient sequencing simply takes those food items and we change the order in which you consume those foods.

We now give you the protein source first alone, tell you to wait about ten minutes, and then we give you the carbohydrate source after that.

And what we're fining is just by simply changing the order of the food, we're seeing improvements in blood glucose.

We're seeing just a naturally more secretion of GLP one in the body.

We're seeing better insulin profiles just by changing the sequence or the order of the food.

We prefer natural foods because it's not just only the protein that you're getting, or getting all of the other healthy elements in the food that you don't get when it's ultra process and you don't yet if it's just like the supplements source.

And Rejal does not disagree.

If you talk to nutritionis, they'll say the best thing is eat a truly balanced die and thats all the components that you need, recognizing a lot of people just can't do that for some of the reasons you described, Are you a second best alternative?

I mean, if people could really eat a balanced diet, would they be better off?

I would say yes.

Reason being is sod all the time in the world should eat three balanced meals.

And the reason is you get all your macronutrients and your micronutrients.

That's just not the reality most people live in.

But as in so much of life, there's the issue of not letting the best become the enemy of the good.

Protein is great, especially in a world of GLP ones, but for some the good of convenience and affordability may outweigh the best of simply eating three well balanced meals a day.

That does it for us.

Here at Wall Street Week, I'm David Weston.

See you next week for more stories of capitalism.