Healthy food is cheap compared to medical care and it has shown great results. Why treat food related disease with medicine and not food?
“I think the biggest argument is the high rates of type two diabetes and obesity, the levels that have risen in America along with other conditions that are linked to metabolic health. I don’t think it’s really comprehensible. We don’t understand how insane it is, but if you click through the maps on the CDC website and see the progression of type two diabetes across the country, it’s absolutely mind blowing. And if nothing else tells us that the regular management of chronic disease has not worked at all, you can barely make the case that it’s even stemmed the tide. So in the context of one person’s individual food choices, healthy food, whatever we decide it is, can be expensive. But in the context of medical care, healthy food is really, really, really cheap, so I think that’s the first argument to be made, is that you have something that is showing really amazing results in some sectors and it’s cheap and it’s subtractive medicine, that is, we’re working to take something away, which is unhealthy food or non health promoting food, like sugar. And if you have the opportunity to practice that kind of medicine in an individual or public health perspective, I think it speaks for itself. The data’s coming in little by little that it can work. If you want to help people change a food related disease, hopefully agnostically or apolitically people can agree that type two diabetes and other metabolic health conditions are food related diseases. So why are we treating a food related diseases with medicine? We try and treat it with food.”