Food Fix

Welcome to Chapter #1: “The True Cost of Food—The Health, Economic, Environmental, and Climate Impact of Our Food System” in which we get our first sobering look at reality AND introduced to the solution.

I could pick any one of a number of alarming stats to make the point here. For now, get this: “Chronic disease is now the single biggest threat to global economic development. Lifestyle-caused diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, and cancer now kill nearly 50 million people a year, more than twice as many as die from infectious disease. Two billion people go to bed overweight and 800 million go to bed hungry in the world today. One in two Americans and one in four teenagers have pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes.”

Note: You know how much that will cost us economically (not to mention emotionally as we and our loved ones struggle with that onslaught of chronic disease)? 95 TRILLION dollars over the next 35 years. Just in the United States alone. (Note: That estimate is 91 percent of the total tax collected by the US government.)

Get the book for the full sobering picture regarding the food systems impact on our health, economics, culture and environment. For now, a quick look at the SOLUTION.

Mark shares a story about a time he spoke at the World Economic Forum where he asked a simple question. He says: “It was after a distinguished panel focused on fixing health care by better health information technology, improved care coordination, reduction in medical errors, improved efficiencies, and improved payment models, all necessary but not sufficient. Their plan was akin to moving the deck chairs around on the Titanic.

Here was the question: Wouldn’t it make more sense to address the root cause of chronic disease that are driving the costs, rather than trying to clean up after the fact? The room of 300 people went silent. It was as if I had just revealed the meaning of life. Afterward the panel moderator, the dean of Columbia University’s School of Public Health, told me how profound the insight was and how all the health leaders were talking about it after. Really? I was shocked. This is so obvious, yet no one had thought of it.”

Yep. That’s the way to Fix a huge problem. FIND THE ROOT CAUSE!!!

That’s from a chapter called “Leveraging Fiscal Policies to Address Obesity and Chronic Diseases” in Part I of the book called “The Health and Economic Impact of Our Food System.”

For the record: Part II is on “The Dirty Politics of Food” while Part III is on “Information Warfare,” Part IV is on “Food and Society: The Destruction of Our Human and Intellectual Capital,” and Part V is on “The Environmental and Climate Impact of Our Food System.”

<- We could write a Note on any individual chapter within any one of those sections.

Each chapter ends with a section called “Food Fix: What You Can Do” in which we are given some big and little things we can do to play our roles well. The #1 Fix for this section and arguably THE biggest single lever we can pull? Simple: STOP DRINKING SUGARY BEVERAGES. Why? Two reasons. One personal and the other structural.

First, the personal: “Cutting sugar-sweetened beverages from your diet is the single-biggest thing you can do to improve your health.” ← Note: That’s a POWERFUL STATEMENT!!!

Again: The SINGLE-BIGGEST THING WE CAN DO TO IMPROVE OUR HEALTH? STOP DRINKING SUGARY BEVERAGES. Am I shouting? Yes, I am.

Second, we have a structural/societal issue: “The best way to reform the food system is to make sugar-laden foods less profitable.” ← Big Food and Big Soda companies make WAY too much money making us WAY too sick. And, we make it way too easy for them with our buying habits AND our subsidies and other policies like allowing their sugary drinks to be purchased via SNAP while allowing them to spend BILLIONS of dollars advertising to our kids (most countries radically limit this), etc. One more time: STOP DRINKING SUGARY BEVERAGES. Today.

P.S. We’ve talked about all this many times before but, it’s important, so I will remind you: “Fruit juice is loaded with sugar and is just as harmful as soda. Avoid buying it, and certainly don’t give it to your children.” ← PARENTS: Are you still giving your kids fruit juice thinking it’s a healthy drink? IT’S NOT!!!

That’s from Chapter #9 called “The FDA Is Not Doing Its Job to Protect Us” in Part II on “The Dirty Politics of Food.” Let’s think about that for a moment.

Of course, we have food labels so we can get a sense of what’s actually in our food. And, naturally, the ingredients are listed in the order of their pre-dominance.

Now… Can you imagine being in the strategic discussion at Smucker’s (and countless other Big Food companies) and coming up with the idea to use three different types of sugar so that “strawberries” could remain at the top of the ingredients list so an unsuspecting customer will pick it up, take a quick glance and then say, “Strawberries. Awesome. Must be healthy!”?

I’m shaking my head as I type that… The book is packed with countless examples of how various stakeholders are manipulating their products and public policy without regard to our health. So… I ask: Can you (and should you) trust a company that does that? Can you (and should you) support a company that does that by buying their products? I don’t think so. You?

(btw: If you feel so inspired, go check out your pantry and take a glance at your food labels. And, remember: We vote for the world we want to create with every dollar we spend.)

That’s from chapter #10 called “How the Food (Mostly Soda) Industry Co-opts Public Health and Distorts Nutrition Science” in Part III on “Information Warfare.”

Imagine that. You bring overweight people into a lab. Give them the same number of calories. But change the proportion of carbs to fat. What happens? Well… If you believe the “energy-balance” theory that is VIGOROUSLY (!!!) promoted by the Food and Soda Industries (and all the other influencers they have co-opted), then NOTHING should be different.

According to their flawed model, a calorie is a calorie and whether you gain or lose weight is entirely based on how many calories you consume via your diet vs. how much you burn via exercise—which is why they try to convince us that we just need to exercise more to lose weight. Only, that’s NOT what the independently conducted research shows. We talk about this in depth in Optimal Weight 101 and in many of our Notes including David Ludwig’s Always Hungry?, Robert Lustig’s Fat Chance and Gary Taubes’s The Case Against Sugar.

Although the Food and Soda Industry try REALLY (!!!) hard to convince us sugar is just another calorie and that a calorie is a calorie, “any third grader could tell you that 1,000 calories of soda and 1,000 calories of broccoli have profoundly different effects on the body.”

Mark shares this wisdom in a chapter featuring some ATROCIOUS manipulation done by the former chief scientist at Coke that draws parallels with the equally ATROCIOUS manipulation done by the tobacco industry back in the day.

He tells us: “In total, Coke provided more than $120 million to US universities, health organizations, and research institutions between 2010 and 2015. From 2008 to 2016 Coke funded 389 articles in 169 journals concluding that physical activity was more important than diet and that soft drinks and sugar are essentially harmless.”

Here’s another fact to chew on: “The food industry spends more than $12 billion a year funding nutrition studies (while the NIH [National Institute of Health] spends only $1 billion), polluting and diluting independent research, and confusing policy makers, the public, and even most doctors and nutritionists. Studies funded by the food industry are eight to fifty times more likely to find a positive outcome for their products.”

Mark also talks about how much money Coke and their Big Food/Big Soda brethren pour into health organizations that are supposed to be serving OUR interests not their corporate sponsors.

Get this: “Twix is a health food according to the American Heart Association, in case you weren’t aware—and so are Froot Loops, Cocoa Puffs, and French Toast Crunch, right along with the 7 teaspoons of sugar per serving. It shouldn’t be called breakfast; it should be called dessert. When you grind it into flour, whole wheat or not, it is worse than sugar. The glycemic index of sugar is 65 and that of whole wheat bread is 75, which means that the bread raises your blood sugar more than table sugar. Below the neck, there is no difference between a bowl of sugar and whole wheat bread. Well, actually, the bread is worse.”

That’s from a chapter called “The Hidden Oppression of Big Food.”

So is this: “A 2016 JAMA landmark study compared the difference in life expectancy between the richest and poorest 1 percent of the population. The difference between those two groups was 15 years for men and 10 years for women. That is equivalent to the loss of life expectancy that results from a lifetime of smoking. More than 38 million Americans live in poverty and almost 100 million live in near poverty.”

← Those numbers are shocking and heart breaking—which is why Mark tells us that “Food is a social justice issue. Our industrial food system is an invisible form of oppression.” How? For many reasons including: “The big food companies target black and Hispanic youth with their least nutritious products, including fast food, candy, sugary drinks, and snacks. From 2013 to 2017, food advertising on black-targeted TV increased by 50 percent. Black teens viewed 119 percent more junk-food-related ads—mostly for soda and candy—than white teens.”

And, in the Introduction, when walking us through the true cost of food, Mark tells us that “money earned from SNAP makes up about 20 percent of Coca-Cola’s annual revenue in the United States. That doesn’t include any revenue from noncarbonated sugar drinks like Powerade or Vitaminwater. That makes Coca-Cola a billion-dollar welfare recipient.”

Think about that for a second. TWENTY-PERCENT of Coke’s revenue comes from our welfare program. Know this: SNAP can’t be used to buy tobacco or alcohol. But it CAN be used to buy sugary sodas—which we KNOW directly contribute to chronic disease. Do you know why that’s the case? Because Coke and their Industry buddies have spent an ENORMOUS amount of money and energy lobbying politicians to make it so (to go with their $12b of junk science).

That’s from a chapter called “Soil, Water, Biodiversity: Why Should We Care?” in which Mark walks us through how to tackle the environmental consequences of our agricultural practices.

Why should we care about our soil and how we’re growing our food and raising our animals for consumption? Because our agricultural practices are the #1 contributor to climate change.

Which is why Mark’s proposed Fix is moving from “extractive” agriculture that depletes our natural capital while contributing to global warming to “regenerative agriculture.”

Check out the book for more on this and all the other details on what Mark calls “the defining problem of our time.”

For now, here’s to opening our eyes to the challenges we are facing across a range of domains and re-committing to playing our roles as virtuously as we can as we strive to change the world, one person at a time, together, starting with you and me.

TODAY.