Caring for Ourselves and Our Planet Starts With What’s On Our Plates

1. You say that the food we eat has tremendous implications not just for our waistlines, but also for the planet, society, and the global economy. In what ways are we being affected?

There is one place that nearly everything matters today in the world converges: our food and food system. Food is the nexus of most of world’s health, economic, environmental, climate, social and even political crises. This is not an exaggeration. As a doctor, my oath is to relieve suffering and illness and do no harm. The science is unequivocal. Our modern industrial ultraprocessed  DIET is THE number one cause of death, disability, and suffering in the world. In fact, it kills over 11 million people a year.

Not only is our diet the biggest killer on the planet, but our food system is the number one cause of climate change.

This led me to ask, what is the cause of our poor diet food and the system that produces it.

Diet and lifestyle-related diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, and cancer now kill nearly fifty million people a year, more than twice as many than diet from infectious disease. Two billion people go to bed overweight and 800 million go to bed hungry. One in two Americans and one in four teenagers as pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes.

Fifty percent of schools serve brand name fast foods in the cafeteria and 80 percent have contracts with soda companies. Food companies target children and minorities with billions in marketing the “worst” foods.

As a doctor, on the front lines of the chronic disease epidemic, it is increasingly clear that our health crisis, along with our social, environmental, climate and economic challenges start with food.

Over the years, I realized that I cannot cure obesity and diabetes in my office. It is cured on the farm, in the grocery store, in the restaurant, in our kitchens, schools, workplaces, and faith-based communities. 

2. You write, “Big food spends a lot of money in Washington to keep us fat and sick." How do you know this and what is happening?

Big Food companies claim to be good stewards of public health. They argue that obesity is a complex issue and that they have an important role to play in addressing it. Engaging in government agencies and working on policy issues is a critical part of this effort, they say. But food companies have a much more insidious motive. The real reason they spend so much money in Washington is so they can block policies that hurt their bottom lines and promote policies that make them money. Food corporations have to answer to their shareholders. They have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder profits, and they pursue this mission zealously, regardless of whether the outcomes are harmful to society or not. Big Food and Big Ag have what the vast majority of Americans do not: Deep pockets and access to the highest levels of government. And they use those to capture the agencies and lawmakers that are supposed to regulate them.

Here are a few examples.

• In 2015 to fight the GMO Labeling bill, the food industry spent $192 million to prevent the public from the right to know if their food contains GMO ingredients.
• One analysis found that in a single year, Utah lobbyists gave state lawmakers more than a quarter-million dollars in gifts, including vacation trips to Florida, tickets to Utah Jazz games, and Billy Joel concert seats. In some cases, they gave lawmakers American Express gift cards.
• What’s worse is that these lobbyists often receive government positions. A former sugar lobbyist now making dietary guidelines.
• Some of the biggest corporations, like Walmart, have as many as 100 lobbyists working for them at any given time.
• It shouldn’t surprise you that food companies and trade groups that lobby the government the most are Coke, Pepsi, Monsanto, the American Beverages Association, Nestle, General Mills, McDonald’s, Kellog, and the candy and dairy industries.
• An analysis of lobbying tactics found that 97 percent of the time the soda industry took positions antagonistic to public health opposing limits to marketing junk food to kids or for better child nutrition.

3. What can we do, as consumers, to solve this problem?

What we eat matters not only to us, but also to almost everything that matters. These simple food principles, based on the best available data we have today, will help prevent and reverse chronic disease, improve mental health, our kids cognitive and behavioral challenges, help solve social injustice, restore ecosystems, reverse climate change and dramatically reduce the true cost of food. These core guidelines for a healthy diet apply to everyone. It should be aspirational, not perfect. You can’t go wrong following these principles:

•  Eat mostly plants.
•  Eat more foods with healthy fats such as olive oil,     avocados, nuts, and seeds.
•  Eat more nuts and seeds.
•  Choose regeneratively raised animal products whenever possible.
• Look for the regenerative organic certified label.
• Buy locally-sourced meat that is grass-fed and grass-finished.
• Look for food labels that identify sustainable, humane food sources, including American Grass-fed, American Humane Certified, Animal Welfare Review Certified, Global Animal Partnership, Certified Sustainable Seafood MSC, Biodynamic, Bird Friendly, etc.
• Use sources like Eatwild, LocalHarvest, and Firsthand Foods.
• Eat pasture-raised eggs.
• Eat sustainably raised or harvested low-mercury, high omega 3 fish.
• Eat only whole grains (not whole grain flours even whole wheat).
• Quit sugary beverages and limit sugar to an occasional treat.
• Stay away from refined vegetable, bean and seed oils.

2. Buy non-GMO and organic foods for your health, the environment, and to send a message that you won’t accept food tainted with pesticides like glyphosate. Stay away from pesticides, herbicides, antibiotics, and hormones in your food. Buying organic is one of the best ways to steer clear of GMOs while sending a message to Big Food to change its practices.

•   Look for the USDA organic seal.
•   Shop at non-GMO retailers.
•   Look for the non-GMO Project Verified seal.
•   Look for labels on meat, poultry, dairy and other foods that say hormone and antibiotic-free.
• Visit localharvest.org/organic-farmsto find small farms in your area that do not use hormones and antibiotics.

3. Shop at farmer’s markets. They are growing and support local food systems. While the impact may be small, it provides a foothold into innovations in agriculture that eventually will spread. Also, start a garden in your windowsill, backyard or community. Do it with your church, school, company or as a family project. Turn your lawn into an edible garden or orchard. Plant fruit trees and avoid the use of glyphosate herbicides like Roundup and pesticides.

4. Eat at restaurants that serve organic, farm to table and/or regenerative food and don’t use animal products raised with antibiotics or hormones. Restaurants all over the world are putting sustainability on the menu, supporting local food systems, preserving lost varieties of vegetables and animals, and more. Find restaurant scorecards regarding antibiotics on the US Public Interest Research Group’s website. 

5. Start a faith-based wellness program in your place of worship. This will change your social environment and make health contagious. Also, be an agent of change in your workplace by encouraging health, mindful eating, and daily exercise into your workday. Start a lunch group, rotating who brings healthy lunches for your group. Start a wellness group for walking or being active together. Get rid of the candy, donuts, sodas. Do your best. One bite at a time.

6. Support Fairtrade products. Fairtrade Internationalis is an organization that supports farmers and workers in dozens of poor countries while also working to protect the environment. Part of its mission is to promote fairness and justice in trade. Look for their logo and support the important work that they do.

7. Use refillable containers made of materials like metal or glass. Plastic containers are bad for your health and bad for the environment. They are made with BPA, BPS (bisphenol-S) and other synthetic chemicals that can leach into your food. Some of these containers can be recycled, but often they end up in landfills or they work their way into rivers, streams, and parks.

8. Reduce your own food waste. Use products such as FreshPaper or use produce protected by Apeel that keeps produce fresher longer. Make soups or stews from veggies that are a little wilted. When cooking, make just enough for your family, or make sure to eat all your leftovers.

9. Start a compost pile and advocate for community or city compost programs. That way whatever waste or food scraps you produce don’t end up in a landfill. No more produce, grains or beans in landfills. Composting is a simple use of letting food scraps biodegrade aerobically by exposing them to oxygen, rotating the food scraps and mixing them with a brown matter (such as sawdust, cardboard, leaves). This turns it into a nutrient-rich organic material that can be used to help build soil in gardens, farms, or your backyard.

10. Turn up the heat on food companies and politicians. It’s up to us, concerned citizens, to pressure our legislators and the food and livestock industries. Start at the local level: If enough states take action, as many states have, then the federal government will be forced to implement changes.

• Donate to campaigns with integrity. The antidote is for more Americans to vote for candidates willing to act in integrity and change the policies needed to fix our broken system. And for more Americans to donate small amounts of money.
• Support ballot initiatives that propose excise taxes that increase the price of soft drinks and that explicitly link revenues to support of health, activity, school programs or provide direct community benefit.
• Lobby your representatives to shift nutrition and agriculture policies to ones that promote health and regenerative sustainable agriculture. And support strict new rules on lobbying and corporate responsibility.
• Vote in local elections to make your voice heard.
• Find out where your local member of Congress stands on SNAP reform.
• See how your representatives vote on food and agriculture issues documented by Food Policy Action (www.foodpolicyaction.org).

4. Are any of the presidential candidates addressing this issue? What can the government do?

No one is addressing this issue with the urgency it requires, and my hope is that together we can start to create a national dialogue around food leading up to the 2020 election. The food system is the number one cause and the number one solution to some of our most prevailing problems including chronic disease and its burden on the economy and federal and state governments. By 2025 nearly 50 percent of our mandatory federal spending will be for Medicare.  Our current food and agricultural system is responsible of half of all greenhouse gas emissions and the #1 cause of climate change. This is why our voice matters. When we say no to processed food and factory farmed meat, we send a message to policymakers and big food.

I think this is the most important issue of our time, and I hope that the candidates will wake up to that as well.

My friends at Food Tank put together a guide that will show you where each candidate stands when it comes to the food system. You can find it here. 

5. What do you hope readers will learn from reading your book?

We live in an extraordinary time. The crises we face from our current food system have devastating consequences – chronic disease and its crippling economic burden on families and society, social injustice, environmental destruction, climate change and more. But we also live in a time of great innovation, possibility, and hope as many around the world are working hard to solve these problems. There are many effective proposals and solutions, extraordinary people thinking about and working on real fixes for our food system.

You can learn about it all in Food Fix: How to Save Our Health, Our Economy, Our Communities, and Our Planet–One Bite at a Time