Telling Americans to 'Eat Better' Doesn't Work. We Must Make Healthier Food

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- 'Telling Americans to ‘eat better’ doesn’t work. We must make healthier food,' The Guardian, Dec. 4, 2022.

- For decades public health authorities have encouraged us to choose healthier foods – yet most choices available to Americans are bad ones.

Diet-related chronic disease is the perennial number one killer in the United States, responsible for more deaths than Covid-19 even at the pandemic’s peak. Yet we cannot manage to define this as a “crisis”. In fact, our response is lame: for decades we’ve been telling people to “eat better”, a strategy that hasn’t worked, and never will. It cannot, as long as the majority of calories we produce are unhealthy. It is the availability of and access to types of food that determines our diets, and those, in turn, are factors of agricultural policy.

For a healthy population, we must mandate or at least incentivize growing real food for nutrition, not cheap meat and corn and soya beans for junk food.

As omnivores, humans have choices, but most choices available to Americans are bad ones. Literally: 60% of the calories in the food supply are in the form of ultra-processed foods (UPFs, or junk food), which are the primary cause of diet-related diseases. That means almost no one can make a “good” choice every time, and many of us can barely make good choices ever. And it’s not enough to say “eat plant-based”, because most junk food is in fact made from plants; the future of food, especially when you add environmental factors, is plant-centric but minimally processed – plants in close to their natural form, in diets that resemble those eaten traditionally by almost everyone in the world until the 20th century.

To make that happen, we must address the functioning of the entire food system.

Government mandates around public health, environmental protection & even literacy can yield desirable results: laws or regulations around seat belts, tobacco, light bulbs, recycling, public education, have all improved public welfare. Yet no such efforts have been made in diet, where the mantra of “behavior change” stands in for good policy. Junk food & meat are both damaging, but must be considered separately: The case for reducing the consumption of junk food rests largely on the facts that UPFs dominate the calorie supply of industrialized nations, & that diet-related diseases (diabetes, heart disease, a dozen cancers) kill around 600,000 Americans per year. (By contrast, at current rates, Covid-19 will kill 100,000 people in the US next year.)

Increasingly, studies show that it isn’t simply “sugar” or “inflammation” or “saturated fat” that causes these diseases, but rather a still-to-be-determined combination of factors inherent in UPFs. We can reduce the consumption of junk food quickly with better labeling laws, taxes on the most egregious offenders (especially sugar-sweetened beverages) and limits on selling junk food on government property and to minors. All of these are being explored in various municipalities in the US and even countries abroad...

- Read More, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/04/americans-diet-public-health-food