Fine Balance Wellness

It seems ironic that the historic passage of President Obama’s Health Care Bill coincided with the launch of the new ABC show, Food Revolution starring Jamie Oliver. The focus of Food Revolution on transforming the understanding for America’s youth of the connection between food and the good health is, unfortunately, actually quite revolutionary in the US. The not so radically innovative Health Care Bill seems to lack critical focus on the actual care of one’s health, rather focusing on closing bureaucratic loopholes, which will likely ensure more people will see more doctors once they have a clinical diagnosis and receive more treatments focused on limiting disease progression. I am not against good care for people when they get sick, but the bill will likely do little to address the underlying issues of why Americans are so overweight and disease ridden.

While the passage of the Health Care Bill may have been out of the hands of the general populous, food choice is not. But for many adults and children, there exists a hard wired legacy of experience and demand for the sugary, processed stuff. The brain is fueled by glucose and there is no faster way to get it into the bloodstream than a sugary soda or candy bar. Americans have been subsisting on processed food, advocated by the US Department of Agriculture since the inception of sugar and corn subsidies, for decades. It is no wonder Americans seem baffled as to why what they eat and feed their children leads them to gain weight and be more prone to illness, and mixed messages leave them even more baffled about what to do about it. Parents are bombarded with marketing material, including messages about the evils of high fructose corn syrup on NYC subway ads but then observe commercials, albeit sponsored by the Corn Refiners Association, where a mother touts the pure and natural state of the health sacrificing syrup.

Successful marketing has been a key to food choice in the US now for decades. At a dinner party last weekend, several guests were up in arms and disturbed about the extreme difficulty in procuring a twinkie. The reality is that even in a well educated group of adults the original twinkie, which is known to be filled with trans fats, is an American cultural icon and childhood staple for all those born after its creation. (Click Twinkie Trivia to learn a host of facts about the beloved Twinkie, including a list of ingredients). I surmise local government action, such as banning trans fats and the current push in New York to tax nondiet and sugar sweetened beverages, will have a deeper impact on the greater state of American health then any provision in the Health Care Bill. And yet the breadth of eliminating some of the health destroyers in American food will not be far reaching enough. As Warren Buffet has remarked the unsustainable health care costs in the US are “a tapeworm eating away at our economic body.”

Food Revolution depicts an alarming reality that American children today are unable to identify common produce like a potato or tomato, yet can easily recognize with great gusto the chicken nugget or fries. Then again, if I was a small child watching the currently aired Heinz ketchup commercial where the bottle of ketchup grows on a vine, I might also be quite confused. It is no big wonder that the enchanting, colorful images, often with misleading health pitches or happy cartoon characters, present a considerable challenge for the child, parent or educator who has not been taught the value of whole foods.(And yes, we thank the super market conglomerate by the same name that helped to spread the knowledge of more healthy eating to the masses, but they too have often succumbed to the brightly boxed food demands of suburbia.) From the first few episodes of Food Revolution it is clear that parents and educators struggle with the tools to assess quality food for their children.

Where does the knowledge about what food choices contribute to good health lie? One might reasonably think to turn to the scientific health experts, the doctor. A dear friend of mind, a physician and graduate of Harvard Medical School, once remarked about having the lack of tools to teach his patients how to eat healthy because he had only one nutrition class throughout his four years of medical school. My guess is it likely focused on nutritionism, an idea about the American diet criticized by the likes of Michael Pollan for the reductionist scientific approach to breaking down food into isolated elements, hence fortifying highly processed foods with every nutrient under than sun to deem them nutritious. Unfortunately, throughout the history of humankind the benefits of whole, unprocessed foods where a host of nutrients coexist naturally have stood the test of time but are not the chosen path in this culture.

The Health Care Bill will likely do little to deepen American’s knowledge about how food can impact greater states of health. It may help more when they are seriously ill, but it will likely continue to avoid the route to victoriously reduce the skyrocketing development of diseases like hypertension and diabetes – prevention. For two weeks in a row Food Revolution has ranked #1, beating out Dateline on NBC and Medium on CBS. And while the health transformation for all Americans can’t be solved entirely by food choice and Jamie Oliver’s US TV debut, thankfully someone equipped with the knowledge of how food relates to good health, as well as a successful track record, is lighting the way for Americans to actually rectify the problem at its root.

To join the Food Revolution movement, sign Jamie’s petition to provide cooking skills in schools and improve the quality of school food. Watch Food Revolution 9pm/8c on ABC.