A new website, Healthy Food Action (www.healthyfoodaction.org), seeks to bring medical professionals into the fight for a healthier food system—and several nutritional experts think it’s about time.
“We looked around and saw that the food system is really in quite a bit of trouble,” David Wallinga, MD, director of the Food and Health Program at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy—creators of the new website—told Organic Connections. “There are signs that it is falling apart, particularly in terms of its negative impact on the health of the American public. We identified a big disconnect between that fact and the fairly broad lack of awareness among health professionals about different aspects of the food system and what they could do to change it for the better. So we came up with Healthy Food Action as a partial way to start to address that disconnect.”
Ashley Koff, registered dietitian, nutritional consultant and author, considers this a vitally important issue. “I think we’ve reached a time, thankfully, when we are realizing the health of our environment and the health of our individual beings are inextricably linked,” Koff told Organic Connections. “Over the last couple of decades we’ve seen a push on ‘food being thy medicine,’ and that sort of thing, in certain isolated sectors with practitioners of integrative medicine. Healthcare practitioners could now start to help patients take steps that are preventative and also demonstrate their power by creating a voice in policy.”
The site seeks to enlist the assistance of medical professionals in changing food and farm policy. “Medical professionals should have been more involved from the very beginning on food and farm policy,” Dr. Wallinga pointed out, “because what could be more basic to human health than food? The sad fact is that farm policy has an incredible impact on both the quality of food and how it’s produced, and through the latter it has an impact—often indirect—on human health as well.
“Just to cite one major example, farm policy helps to determine that 70 percent of antibiotics are not given to people but instead are given to animals just to make them grow faster on less feed, or for reasons other than the animal being sick. We’re giving most of the antibiotics in the country to animals that aren’t sick for purposes that are economic and not about health. That’s a problem. And it’s a problem because we’ve got an epidemic now of people being struck down by bacterial infections that are resistant to one or two or even twelve antibiotics. And this overuse and needless use of antibiotics in animal feed is a big contributor to that problem.”
The Healthy Food Action site provides ways and means for medical professionals to lend their support in rectifying the antibiotic issue through policy change, and in the near future will address other situations such as arsenic in poultry feed and restructuring the Farm Bill.
Dr. Wallinga does see a needed educational step with medical professionals, and he and his organization have evolved methods to accomplish this. “The food system is huge, so big that it sort of defies easy attempts to pigeonhole it or to reduce it to a sound bite,” he said. “One educational method is to start with things like obesity that are health outcomes of a broken food system. We can then march up the food chain showing people the different ways in which decisions at every level, including at the farm, end up contributing to obesity. We could do the same thing for heart disease or diabetes or stroke—any of these chronic health conditions that are hugely expensive, which are also related to poor diet and ultimately to this food system.
“The second way to do it is to take an approach that draws links for people between different parts of this huge food system that they might not have known were connected. An example is the one I just used, linking infections in humans to what’s going on at the farm in terms of the overuse of antibiotics. If you’re an infectious-disease physician in a hospital, maybe you didn’t know about that link before, or perhaps you wouldn’t have even thought of it. If a person came into your clinic or your hospital with a drug-resistant infection, you might not have thought to ask them, ‘Hey, do you raise pigs for a living, or do you have any exposure to chickens? Because, if so, that could be a big factor in why you’ve got this resistant bacteria.’ So hopefully, after some of our outreach and advocacy work, medical professionals will start to make those connections and not only effect policy change for an improved food system but, maybe even better, address these problems with their patients as well.”
Daniella Chace, clinical nutritionist and author of 20 books on nutrition, shared her views with Organic Connections about this important project. “I feel that information coming from doctors directly to patients and the general public is really critical,” she said. “As far as the public eye goes, I think there will be awareness about our food system when health professionals are bringing that awareness to people. A website like this makes it very easy for them to get involved, to learn, and to bond together, and by bonding together, to make changes directly on legislature.”
Carolyn Dean, MD, ND, and noted author of some 15 books on natural health, also considers the involvement of medical professionals to be a key issue. “Although it sounds bizarre, to many medical professionals food is not medicine,” she told Organic Connections. “Medical doctors specifically are taught to diagnose and treat disease symptoms with drugs. They’ve never really gone beyond that. It’s a difficult road here, which one would think is so simple and obvious. So, yes, let’s eat good food, let’s support good food, and let’s get doctors behind this.”
Recommend to your local medical professionals that they visit the site at www.healthyfoodaction.org.
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