How did we get in this mess?

Guest Post by MARK HYMAN by our keynote speaker for the Co-Mindfulness Summit

And what’s next…   As a doctor, my oath is to relieve suffering and illness and to do no harm. As a Functional Medicine physician, I was trained to focus on the root causes of disease and to think of our body as one interconnected ecosystem. 

After decades of treating over 10,000 patients and digging into the root of most of their suffering, I found it was food. And food was the cure.  

I began to wonder: If food was the cause of their suffering, what was the cause of the food? It is the food system. Then, why, I asked myself, do we have the food system we do? It is our dysfunctional food policies, and why do we have those? The outsized influence of the food industry. 

As I burrowed down into the rabbit hole of our food system I discovered it was connected to almost everything that matters to us and is harming our health, our society, our economy, and our planet—the enormous burden of obesity and chronic disease; its staggering economic impact (the Medicare Trust Fund will be out of money by 2026); the social challenges caused by the effect of ultra-processed food on our childrens’ learning, development, mood, and behavior; the perpetuation of poverty and violent behavior and even national security because 70% of recruits are unfit to fight.

And then there is the real, often unappreciated, cause of climate change—our food system, which end-to-end causes 50% of greenhouse gas emissions.

If this is the case, then doesn’t it surprise you that the topic of food and the food system gets little to no attention in the media or political debates? It shocks me, especially considering that transforming this broken system could save our country trillions of dollars. Literally, trillions. If we changed our food system we can fix all the downstream problems.

Food is the problem, but it is also the solution. Starting with regenerative agriculture which would reverse climate change, restore soils, preserve scarce water resources and increase biodiversity while providing better food in ways that heal eaters, and makes farmers more resilient and financially stable. The current conventional system is leading us to run out of soil in 60 harvests and is destroying our freshwater, damaging oceans and an unprecedented loss of biodiversity of plants, animals, and pollinators.

Over the next 35 years, chronic disease will cost our society $95 trillion in both direct health care costs and the loss of productivity due to heart disease, cancer, mental illness, and more.

With this money, we could provide free education, free healthcare, end unemployment, and that’s just to name a few.

Eleven million people die every year from a bad diet. That’s more than smoking, accidents, guns, or war. Why aren’t we sounding the alarm?

We should be shifting our food system from one that is disease-causing to one that focuses on providing real, whole food to everyone.

I know this seems like a problem of great magnitude, one that seems hard to even wrap our heads around, but there are REAL solutions. And these solutions require your help.

A few years ago, I realized that I cannot cure chronic disease 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. So I spent the past two years researching solutions to fix our broken food system, and I’ve collected everything I found into my book, Food Fix: How to Save Our Health, Our Economy, Our Communities, and Our Planet—One Bite at a Time.

There are so many misconceptions out there about what it means to eat well, reverse climate change, protect food workers, and provide a safe environment for animals. I wanted to create a guide that would not only allow people to take back their own health, but transform schools, local communities, and especially our food and agriculture policies.

I know that my readers are among the most passionate citizens ready to not only make shifts in their own health but to help create a ripple effect in which we solve some of the world’s biggest problems. I created Food Fix, so we can take on this herculean yet doable task together.

If you’re ready to transform the food system with me, learn more about Food Fix here.

Wishing you health and happiness,

Mark Hyman, MD

❤️️ This has been a Guest Post by MARK HYMAN our keynote speaker for the Oct 3, 2020 Co-Mindfulness Summit