What Could We Do If We Weren’t Paying So Much On Healthcare?

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. A lot of the chronic disease that we see, the cost of it is caused by mental illness. And we know from the literature that mental health is directly related to our diets. Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman and that's Pharmacy with an F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. And if you care about your health, if you care about food, if you care about social injustice, our environment, our climate, if you care about improving the health of our children, their academic performance and mental well-being. If you care about pretty much anything that's going on in the world today, then this conversation should matter to you because it's about our food system. And these little minisodes are based on my new book, Food Fix: How to Save Our Health, Our Economy, Our Communities, and Our Planet One Bite at a Time. The reason I wrote this book is because the The food system as a whole connects the dots. It's where everything that matters to us comes together. Where all these issues are simply one issue. That's the good news and the bad news. The bad news is the food system is causing most of these problems. Our economic woes, chronic disease, environmental damage, climate change, social injustice, and much more. Even threats to national security But it's also the solution if we work together to solve these problems as individual citizens, as businesses and innovators, as nonprofits and philanthropists, and especially as policy makers, because we must have policy change, then we can solve these problems together. And I want to spend a little bit of time going through these issues in detail so you can begin to understand the scope of the problem, but also be inspired by the solutions that are out there. And the good news is we actually have the solutions today. We don't need new innovation. We don't need new technology, although we welcome it. But with our existing understanding of our food system and what's wrong with it, we do have the tools, the knowledge, the ability to change it. All we need is the will, the will of the people, the will of businesses to change, and the will of policymakers to implement changes in policy that support a food system that's regenerative, that's restorative, that brings health and well-being to a citizen's and to the environment and our climate, and that actually is good for all of us, and especially good for the economy. And I want to talk about that to start, because the book starts out with the conversation about the true cost of food, the real economic impact of our food system on everything we care about. I mean, think about it. If we didn't have to spend all the money we spend on chronic disease, we would have enough money for all the things that we care about in the world, for free education, free health care, for bringing people up out of poverty, for ending social injustice, for restoring environments, for actually helping fund the reversal of climate change. it would be an enormous amount of money. In fact, it's been estimated that over the next 35 years it's going to cost our society $95 trillion to address chronic disease. That's both indirect costs, which probably account for the loss of productivity and performance that people have being at the job and not on the job, if you know what I mean, and also just absenteeism, disability and so forth. lost quality of life years they call it. And that's going to be about 50 something trillion dollars. The direct costs for healthcare are going to be 15 to 20 trillion dollars which is a lot of money and then there's some other miscellaneous costs in there. So we have a real problem of spending these dollars in ways that are counterproductive and for which we have the solution to not spend those dollars. If chronic disease is caused by food and it can be cured by food then why not change the food to fix the problem. It seems so obvious, but no one's really thinking about it. And that is a huge problem. And you know, it's interesting, a lot of the chronic disease that we see, the cost of it is caused by mental illness. And we know from the literature that mental health is directly related to our diets. It can cause depression, it can cause anxiety, it can cause more significant mental illnesses, it's even connected to autism, learning disabilities, behavioral issues, violence. suicide simply by changing the diet from a processed industrial diet to a whole foods diet, you can help improve all those things. And I think we have to think about what's really going on in this world. Why aren't we addressing these costs? I mean, think about it. If we look at the data, and this is, I think, conservative based on the Global Burden of Disease study by Chris Murray, 11 million people around the world die every year from eating bad food and not enough good food. And bad food is defined as processed foods. We call it ultra processed foods, where the raw materials from industrial agriculture, basically wheat, corn, soy, palm oil, sugar, et cetera, are turned into various kinds of shape sizes of industrial food products that are basically the same ingredients in different size shapes and colors and tastes that are sold at a huge amount of profit. but have very poor nutrient quality and are very nutrient poor but calorie rich, particularly starch and sugar which drives disease. So I think if you look at the other data related to this based on those studies, if you add in the related heart disease and high blood pressure issues and kidney failure and all diabetes which are food related, the number creeps up upwards of 11 million. Maybe it's 10, 20, 30, 40 million. It's an enormous amount of deaths. Now imagine if there was a crisis globally that was causing that many deaths. If there was Zika or Ebola or AIDS even, with AIDS we had the one project which raised $100 billion to solve the AIDS problem and help fix AIDS in Africa. I mean this was funded by the US government because it was seen as an existential threat. But we are killing far more people with our diet than we ever will from AIDS or malaria or TB or or other issues that are facing our population. Yes, those have to be dealt with, but today the staggering cost of food and obesity is food related obesity and disease is frightening. More than 2 billion people every day go to bed overweight and are sick from eating our processed industrial diet and not eating a whole food diet. The number one cause turns out from some of these studies is not only the lack of, not only the abundance of processed food, but the lack of actually whole foods, the lack of fruits and and the studies show that for every 10% of your diet that comes from ultra processed food, your risk of death goes up by 14%. What's striking is based on surveys of our American diet, 60% of our diet is made up of ultra processed food and the people who eat the most are the sickest, are the fattest, are the ones most likely to die and have diabetes, inflammation and worse. So we have enormous amounts of problems and then of course our government tells us eat more foods and vegetables. but guess what? Only 2% of our farmland is used to grow fruits and vegetables, despite our government's recommendations that 50% of our diet should be fruits and vegetables. If everybody ate the amount of vegetables and fruits that are recommended by the government, there'd be not enough to go around. So we have to change our agricultural policies. In fact, we'll get into the agricultural subsidy issues when we talk about what's being supported. But if a farmer who's growing corn and soy wants to diversify and grow vegetables and fruits, they get penalized by the government for doing that. These kinds of the policies need to change. We also see an enormous cost of some of these things that are going on now. We see not just the cost of chronic disease in terms of actual health care costs, not only the cost in terms of human suffering, how do you put a price on that, but the direct health care costs are so big in this country just for chronic diseases related mostly to food, it was 1.1 trillion in 2016 or about 6% of our gross domestic product. If you add in the indirect costs, lost income productivity, there's another $2.6 trillion. That's $3.7 trillion a year just to deal with chronic disease related costs. So most of these are related to lifestyle, high blood pressure, cholesterol issues, arthritis, diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke. What's frightening, in 10 years, 83 million Americans will have three or more chronic diseases up from 30 million in 2015. We see that this is just a developed country problem, right? No, it's not. 80% of the world's type 2 diabetics are in the developing world. In low and middle income countries, 80% of obesity and chronic disease is in those countries and they often have this double burden of malnutrition, both obesity and lack of nutrition, adequate nutrition. So you see kids with malnutrition in the same house as parents with diabetes and obesity. And the problem isn't trying to provide more healthcare, right? I mean, the Medicare for all concept, well, maybe it has some benefit arguments for it, but I think that it doesn't make sense, right? If you want to either solve the federal debt problem, which is $22 trillion, by reducing Medicare spending, right? By cutting entitlements, which is what some want to do, or expanding them, which some want to do through Medicare for All, it's the wrong set of choices. It's false choices. The choice is why not prevent people from going into the system in the first place, right? Why not actually stop the flood of sick people into healthcare so we don't need all those healthcare dollars spent? I mean, in 2026, that's six years from now, six years from now, the Medicare Trust Fund, which is basically the piggy bank that pays for Medicare, will be bankrupt. There will be no money, it will all have to come out of federal taxes, which means increasingly our federal tax revenue will be needed to pay for health care. It's been estimated by 2042 almost 100% of our federal and state tax revenue will be used to pay for Medicare and Medicaid. It's completely unsustainable. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that just in five years, 48% of our entire mandatory federal spending will be used for health programs like Medicare and Medicaid. It's unsustainable. So we have this incredible economic burden. The cost of diseases are going up. But there's other costs, right? It's not just the cost of chronic disease to individuals. It's not just the cost to our economy. It's not just the lack of being able to provide all these other services that we could as a government or as a society to our citizens if we didn't have to pay for this overwhelming burden of chronic disease caused by food. It's a lot of other consequences that we're going to talk about. So let's talk a little bit about the true costs of our food, because the true costs are not borne by the companies that cause the problems. They're not paid at the checkout counter, the grocery store, the restaurant. They're paid by all of us indirectly through the loss of our health, our happiness and productivity. And they're paid for by the health of our soil, our air, our water, our climate, our oceans, all of it is what it costs us. And we're gonna talk about that. If the true price of food were built into the price we pay, or if Big Ag and Big Food had to pay for the harm caused by the food they produce, the pollution, the loss of biodiversity, the loss of soil and cropland, the depletion of our water resources, the chronic disease that results from people eating the food, the food and farm worker injustices, people who grow the food and serve the food, which we'll talk more about in the episodes to come, then maybe your grass-fed steak and organically regeneratively grown produce and food would actually be much cheaper than industrial processed food. I recently went on Amazon and looked up the price of water. compared to the price of soda. Smartwater made by Coke is 9 cents an ounce. Pepsi is 2 cents an ounce. Now, last time I looked, Pepsi is made from water and a few other ingredients. So, how does that even make sense? When water is four times the cost of soda, we have a problem. Now, speaking of soda, well, maybe I shouldn't, but I'm gonna anyway. A recent study found your risk of heart disease is 31% higher if you consumed two sugar-sweetened beverages a day. If a kid drinks a can of soda a day, his risk of obesity goes up by 60%. If a woman drinks a can of soda a day, her risk of diabetes goes up about the same amount. Now the American government plays a big role in the soda industry, not only supporting the production of corn that's used for high fructose corn syrup, but we pay for 31 billion servings of soda every single year to the poor through our food stamp program, or SNAP. At 7 billion a year, it's the biggest line item in SNAP, which accounts for almost 10% of the, quote, food purchased by the SNAP recipients. You do the math. If a two-liter bottle of Coke is $1.79, that's 22 cents per 8 ounce serving. That's 31 billion servings. And we know this is something that almost every scientist on the planet except that they work for Coke and Pepsi agree that soda causes obesity and disease. Now, the other scary fact is the money that's earned from SNAP makes up about 20% of Coke's annual revenue in the US. That doesn't include any revenue from non-carbonated sugar drinks like Powerade or Vitamin Water. And oddly, the United States Department of Agriculture or USDA won't disclose where those food stamp dollars are being used. And they're saying it's to protect the privacy of big retailers like Walmart or Kroger. What are they hiding and why aren't they protecting us? I don't think it's supposed to be government for the corporations by the corporations of the corporations. It's supposed to be government for the people by the people of the people or something like that. Now we also indirectly Give them a tax break by supporting their marketing of sugar and junk food to kids who are uniquely susceptible to these messages. In fact, they spend billions and billions of dollars targeting kids in advertising and they get a great tax break for that. So we also have to pay for that as well. So I think these are not meant to freak you out, this is not meant to scare you. It's meant to help you understand the enormous costs of to society, to human capital, to natural capital, to the economic capital, to social capital that is resulting from our current food system and the way we grow, the way we process, produce, distribute, market, consume, and even waste food. Now, we can't end war or we cannot achieve immortality, at least not now, We can't solve these things, but this is a solvable problem. And it's going to take enormous effort from every stakeholder, from governments, from citizens, from businesses, from philanthropists, from activists, from nonprofits. But before we can really solve the problem, we need to understand it and we need to name it. Everything is related to the food we eat in the food system, how we grow it, process it, produce it, distribute it, consume it, waste it affects almost everything that matters in our world. And yet, this is a fixable problem, right? We need to think about these problems holistically. We need to think about it as one system out of balance. And it'll help us reimagine the food system we want, the world we want, by addressing the overall dysfunctions in the food system. We can solve these problems. The solutions exist. They will call on a lot of us to fix it in multiple sectors and stakeholders from citizens and consumers to businesses and farmers, to policymakers in every level of government, including city and state, to nonprofits, philanthropists, scientists, all have to come together in global agreement and efforts to really transform the food system. So this can happen, I believe it, and throughout my book, Food Fix, I go through what the issues are, how to fix them, what the ideas exist that are there now, and how we actually fix the problem. We need to go from the grassroots, we need to go from the top down, we need to go every which direction, but we can use the power of our forks and our collective behaviors to move in the right direction. And that's what I wrote Food Fix to do, was to help us think about the ways in which citizens, businesses, policymakers can solve this biggest problem we face today, our broken food system and its consequences. So I hope you've enjoyed this podcast. And if you like this podcast, please share with your friends and family on social media. Please leave a comment. I'd love to hear from you your thoughts about this. And I hope it's inspired you to think differently a little bit. I will see you next week on the Doctor's Pharmacy. Don't forget, there's a way to listen completely ad-free. 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