07/10/2021
Ironic isn’t it?
We must fix the food system. Create a healthy nation so we don’t have those costs in the first place.
In 2013 I spoke at the World Economic Forum and at a big gathering of the world’s health care leaders from government, pharma, insurers and health care systems, I asked a simple question. It was after a distinguished panel focused on fixing health care by better health information technology, improved care coordination, reduction of medical errors, improved efficiencies and improved payments 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 causes 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 this 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.
The “cheap” food that causes disease is not so cheap after all. The hope and promise of the Green Revolution—to use agricultural technology to create abundant cheap food to feed the world turned out to have horrible unintended consequences. In fact, cheap food turns out to be very, very expensive.
Yes, chronic disease is costly. And kills millions. But that is only a small part of the total cost driven by our food system. Chronic disease is just one spoke in the wheel among many consequences of our current food system. Add to these costs the real cost of our food system on the environment, economy, climate, social justice issues, poverty, education, national security and more and this number grows dramatically.
I talk about these costs and the solutions we have at hand in my book, Food Fix. FoodFixBook.com
