This is a YouTube video titled "COVID-19 Highlights Our Broken Food System" containing a monologue or talk from May 19, 2020, discussing the high prevalence of diet-related diseases in the American population, the impact of poor diet on mortality rates, and the urgent need to reform the food system in light of the COVID-19 pandemic's effects on public health and the economy.
We have almost three in four American adults who are overweight or obese. And about half of American adults have diabetes or pre-diabetes. When you start saying that the healthy population is the small minority of the population, right? That's not okay, right? It should be that people with disease are the minority and we generally have a healthy population. We've completely flip that on its head and we have a tiny, tiny proportion of the population that's actually healthy and everybody else has disease. And most of that disease, not all of it, most of that disease is strongly diet related. So, you wrote in your CNN article that before COVID-19 that poor diet kills 530,000 Americans every year, about 1,500 deaths every day. That was before COVID-19. Yeah, so you know COVID-19 is tragic and these 50,000 deaths already in the United States are tragic and we need to be doing everything we can to reduce this. And at the same time before COVID-19 around 40,000 Americans were dying every month directly from diet related diseases that we've estimated that would not have happened if they had a healthy diet. And so And we weren't going up in arms and saying, we have to stop this. This is causing catastrophe. But it was. It's causing billions of dollars, tens of billions of dollars in preventable health care costs, which burdens our American businesses, which burdens our federal governments and state government budgets. It's causing incredible disparities, big differences between the haves and the have-nots in our society. and it's causing a lot of suffering and it's overwhelming our healthcare system. So here's where I think, you know, I'm, you know, moving beyond, you know, today to think about the rest of 2020, 2021, the next administration, we really need to take this learning from COVID that we do not have a healthy population and that when you don't have a healthy population and a crisis strikes, it shuts down the economy and people suffer and businesses suffer, we need to take that knowledge and fix the food system.
