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Food Fix
How to Save Our Health, Our Economy, Our Communities, and Our Planet--One Bite at a Time
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What we eat has tremendous implications not just for our waistlines, but also for the planet, society, and the global economy. What we do to our bodies, we do to the planet; and what we do to the planet, we do to our bodies.
In Food Fix, #1 bestselling author Mark Hyman explains how our food and agriculture policies are corrupted by money and lobbies that drive our biggest global crises: the spread of obesity and food-related chronic disease, climate change, poverty, violence, educational achievement gaps, and more.
Pairing the latest developments in nutritional and environmental science with an unflinching look at the dark realities of the global food system and the policies that make it possible, Food Fix is a hard-hitting manifesto that will change the way you think about—and eat—food forever, and will provide solutions for citizens, businesses, and policy makers to create a healthier world, society, and planet.
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Introduction
It is a wonderful feeling to recognize the unity of a complex of phenomena that to direct observation appear to be quite separate things.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
It is… our apparent reluctance to recognize the interrelated nature of the problems and therefore the solutions that lies at the heart of our predicament and certainly on our ability to determine the future of food.
—PRINCE CHARLES
There is one place that nearly everything that matters in the world today converges: our food and our food system—the complex web of how we grow food, how we produce, distribute, and promote it; what we eat, what we waste, and the policies that perpetuate unimaginable suffering and destruction across the globe that deplete our human, social, economic, and natural capital.
Food is the nexus of most of our world’s health, economic, environmental, climate, social, and even political crises. While this may seem like an exaggeration, it is not. The problem is much worse than we think. After reading Food Fix you will be able to connect the dots of this largely invisible crisis and understand why fixing our food system is central to the health and well-being of our population, our environment, our climate, our economy, and our very survival as a species. You will also understand the forces, businesses, and policies driving the catastrophe, and the people, businesses, and governments that are providing hope and a path to fixing our dysfunctional food system.
But why would a doctor be so interested in food, the system that produces it, and food policy?
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.
Our diet is the number one cause of death, disability, and suffering in the world. Our food has dramatically transformed over the last 100 years, and even more radically over the last 40 years, as we have eaten a diet of increasingly ultraprocessed foods made from a handful of crops (wheat, corn, soy). If poor diet is the biggest killer on the planet, I was forced to ask, what is the cause of our food and the system that produces it? This led to a deep exploration of the entire food chain, from seed to field to fork to landfill, and the harm caused at each step of the journey. The story of food shocked me, frightened me, and drove me to tell this story and to find the possibility of redemption from the broken system that is slowly destroying the people and things we love most.
Our most powerful tool to reverse the global epidemic of chronic disease, heal the environment, reverse climate change, end poverty and social injustice, reform politics, and revive economies is food. The food we grow, how we grow it, and the food we eat have tremendous implications not just for our waistlines but also for our communities, the planet, and the global economy.
Chronic disease is now the single biggest threat to global economic development. Lifestyle-caused diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, and cancer now kill nearly 50 million people a year, more than twice as many as die from infectious disease. Two billion people go to bed overweight and 800 million go to bed hungry in the world today. One in two Americans and one in four teenagers have pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes.
Lobbyists’ influence over policy makers has put corporations, not citizens, at the center of every aspect of our food system, from what and how food is grown to what is manufactured, marketed, and sold. When money rules politics, it results in our current uncoordinated and conflicting food policies, which subsidize and protect and facilitate Big Food’s and Big Ag’s domination of our food system to the detriment of our population and our environment. Big Ag and Big Food co-opt politicians, public health groups, grassroots advocacy groups, scientists, and schools and pollute science and public opinion with vast amounts of dollars and misinformation campaigns. The consolidation and monopolization of the food industry over the last 40 years from hundreds of different processed-food companies, seed companies, and chemical and fertilizer companies into just a few dozen companies make it the largest collective industry in the world, valued at approximately $15 trillion, or about 17 percent of the entire world’s economy. And it is controlled by a few dozen CEOs who determine what food is grown and how it is grown, processed, distributed, and sold. This affects every single human on the planet.
Our children’s future is threatened by an achievement gap caused in large part by their inability to learn on a diet of processed foods and sugar served in schools. Fifty percent of schools serve brand-name fast food in their cafeterias and 80 percent have contracts with soda companies. Food companies target children and minorities with billions in marketing of the worst “foods.”
Poverty, social injustice, and violence are perpetuated by the harmful effects of our nutritionally toxic and depleted food environment on children’s intellectual development, mood, and behavior. Violent prison crime can be dramatically reduced by providing a healthy diet to prisoners. Our national security is threatened because our young adults are not fit to fight and not eligible for service, and many of our soldiers are overweight.
We are also depleting nature’s capital—capital that, once destroyed, may only be able to be partially reclaimed. The threat is not only to our health and our children’s future, but also to the health of the planet that sustains us. Our industrial agricultural and food system (including food waste) is the single biggest cause of climate change, exceeding all use of fossil fuels. Current farming practices may cause us to run out of soil and fresh water in this century. We are destroying our rivers, lakes, and oceans by the runoff of nitrogen-based fertilizers, which is creating vast swaths of marine dead zones. We waste 40 percent of the food we produce, costing more than $2.6 trillion a year in global impact.
There is a solution, a food fix. Across the globe there are governments, businesses, grassroots efforts, and individuals who are reimagining our food system, creating solutions that address the challenges we face across the landscape of our food system. This book both defines the problems and maps out the policies, business innovations, and grassroots solutions, providing ideas for what we can each do to improve our health and the health of our communities and the planet.
The imperative to transform our food system is not just medical, moral, or environmental, but economic. Dariush Mozaffarian, MD, the dean of Tufts School of Nutrition Science and Policy, injects hope into what may seem like an overwhelming problem and highlights the “waves of innovation and capital now sweeping food and allied disciplines, from agriculture to processing to restaurants and retail, and in healthcare, personalization, mobile tech, and employee wellness. Catalyzing this multi-billion-dollar revolution, and ensuring its rapid trajectory is evidence-based and mission-oriented, is an essential opportunity and challenge.”
As a doctor, it is increasingly clear to me that the health of our citizens, the health of our society and our planet, depends on disruptive innovations that decentralize and democratize food production and consumption, innovations that produce real food at scale, that restore the health of soils, water, air, and the biodiversity of our planet, and that reverse climate change. I cannot cure obesity and diabetes 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.
All these things and more can provide the seeds for the type of transformation needed to solve one of the central problems of our time—the quality of what we put on our fork every day. We have to take back our health one kitchen, one home, one family, one community, one farm at a time! Changes to our own diet are necessary but not sufficient to truly create the shifts needed to create a healthy, sustainable, just world.
The policies and businesses that drive our current system must change to support a reimagined food system from field to fork and beyond. If we were to identify one big lever to pull to improve global health, create economic abundance, reduce social injustice and mental illness, restore environmental health, and reverse climate change, it would be transforming our entire food system. That is the most important work of our time—work that must begin now.
PART I
THE HEALTH AND ECONOMIC IMPACT OF OUR FOOD SYSTEM
People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are healed by the health industry, which pays no attention to food.
—WENDELL BERRY
CHAPTER 1
THE TRUE COST OF FOOD—THE HEALTH, ECONOMIC, ENVIRONMENTAL, AND CLIMATE IMPACT OF OUR FOOD SYSTEM
Ninety-five trillion dollars—$95,000,000,000,000—is an almost unimaginable number. Yet this is an estimate of the burden that will be put on our economy by chronic disease over the next 35 years in both direct health care costs and lost productivity and disability. To put it in perspective, that is almost five times our nation’s gross domestic product of $20 trillion a year. According to the World Bank, in 2017, the entire world’s GDP was just $80 trillion.
For that amount of money, we could…
Provide free education
Provide free health care
Eradicate poverty
End food insecurity and hunger
Solve social injustice, income, and health disparities
End unemployment
Rebuild our infrastructure and transportation systems
Shift to renewable energy
Draw down carbon emissions and reverse climate change
Transform our industrial agricultural system, which is destructive to humans, animals, and the environment, into a sustainable, regenerative system that reverses climate change, preserves our freshwater resources, increases biodiversity, protects pollinators, and produces health-promoting whole foods
That $95 trillion is the total cost of chronic illness to the United States over the next 35 years (or 91 percent of the total tax collected by the US government), in both direct health care costs and the loss of productivity due to heart disease, diabetes, cancer, mental illness, and other chronic conditions.1 Imagine if we had a significant portion of those resources to spend on things that matter to all of us rather than preventable chronic disease. Most of those diseases are caused by our industrial diet, which means they are avoidable if we transform the food we grow, the food we produce, and the food we eat. The $95 trillion is just the start of the value to our economy if we fix all the broken parts of our food system. Clearly not all chronic disease will disappear, nor will all those who are chronically ill be able to go back to work. But if even a conservative fraction of that money, an estimated $15 trillion, is available, it would provide crucial resources to solve our most critical problems. And $15 trillion is still about four years of our total federal tax collections.
Eleven million people die every year from a bad diet. And more than a billion people in the world are overweight and sick from eating our processed, industrialized diet and not eating a healthy whole foods diet.2 In fact, the number one factor causing these deaths is the lack of fruits and vegetables in our diet. The sad thing is that in America only 2 percent of our farmland is used to grow fruits and vegetables, despite our government’s recommendations that 50 percent of our diet should be fruits and vegetables. Fifty-nine percent of our farmland is used to grow commodity crops (corn, wheat, soy) that get turned into ultraprocessed foods that we know are deadly. These processed foods make up about 60 percent of our diet!
Why does this matter? For every 10 percent of your diet that comes from processed food, your risk of death goes up 14 percent.3 That means a lot of extra deaths because we support agriculture that creates food that makes us sick and fat and harms the environment, and not the production of fruits and vegetables and whole foods that make us healthy.
The complexity of the problem prevents people from connecting the dots and taking action. And most of the true costs are not even recognized, limiting the motivation to change the system. Let’s take a journey through every aspect of the food system and connect those dots.
THE COSTS OF CHRONIC DISEASE
In 2018, the Milken Institute issued two major reports. The first, The Cost of Chronic Diseases in the US,4 and the second, America’s Obesity Crisis: The Health and Economic Costs of Excess Weight,5 map out the staggering impact of food obesity and disease caused mostly by our current food system. It’s overwhelming, but here are just a few of the key facts:
The direct health care costs for chronic health conditions was $1.1 trillion in 2016, or 5.8 percent of our US gross domestic product (GDP).
The indirect costs, including just lost income, reduced productivity, and impact on caregivers, but not including the impact of our food system on the environment, were another $2.6 trillion. The combined direct and indirect costs are $3.7 trillion, or one in five dollars of our whole economy. Every year!
Most of the diseases driving the costs are related to obesity and poor diet: abnormal cholesterol, osteoarthritis, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and kidney failure. It’s important to note that these costs do not include pre-diabetes, which affects one in two Americans and causes heart attacks, strokes, and dementia even if it never leads to full-blown type 2 diabetes.
In ten years 83 million Americans will have three or more chronic diseases, compared to 30 million in 2015. Today 60 percent of Americans have one chronic disease and 40 percent have two or more chronic diseases.
Seventy percent of Americans are either overweight or obese—that’s about 228 million Americans! Forty percent are obese, up from 3.4 percent in 1962.
Now let’s think about this globally. If 2.2 billion people around the world are overweight, the costs are beyond comprehension. If the burden of chronic disease will cost the American economy $95 trillion over the next 35 years, what might the global costs be?
Global per capita health care costs are one-tenth that of the United States and the global obesity rates are lower as well, but the global costs are also staggering. For argument’s sake, if you assume that there are 1,000 times (over 2.2 billion worldwide) as many people overweight in the world as there are in the United States,6 could the global costs be in the quadrillions of dollars? That’s a lot of zeros.
How does this impact us? While Democrats argue to create Medicare for All and Republicans argue to reduce entitlements to bring down our $22 trillion national debt, both are missing the obvious fact. Fix the reason why we have those costs in the first place. Stop the flow of sick people into the system and the harm to our environment and climate by fixing the cause: our food system.
Yet most of our government’s policies promote the growing, production, marketing, sale, and consumption of the worst diet on the planet—billions in subsidies (known as crop insurance or other supports) for commodity crops turned into processed food and food for factory-farmed animals; $75 billion a year in food stamp payments that effectively reduce hunger but are mostly for processed food and soda; unregulated food marketing of soda and junk food; confusing food labels; industry-influenced dietary guidelines; and more. Its very policies also support agricultural practices that pollute the environment and worsen climate change.
The Congressional Research Service estimates that by 2025, 48 percent of our entire mandatory federal spending will be for health programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.7 Bill Haslam, the former governor of Tennessee, shared with me that one in three dollars of its state budget is spent on Medicaid. This does not account for all the federal programs covering health care, including the Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Defense, Children’s Health Insurance Program, and Indian Health Service, among others. All in all, our government covers 50 to 60 percent of health care costs in America. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) projects that by 2048, Medicare and Medicaid will account for $3.2 trillion in federal spending. To put that in perspective, our entire federal tax collections are only $3.8 trillion.8 There will be almost nothing left for the government as a whole—for defense, education, transportation, or anything else. Neither cutting Medicare nor creating Medicare for All will solve this problem.
HOW TO FIX HEALTH CARE: BEYOND CUTTING ENTITLEMENTS OR MEDICARE FOR ALL
In 2013 I spoke at the World Economic Forum, and at a big gathering of the world’s health care leaders from government, the pharmaceutical industry, insurers, and health care systems, I asked a simple question. It was after a distinguished panel focused on fixing health care by better health information technology, improved care coordination, reduction of medical errors, improved efficiencies, and improved payment models, all necessary but not sufficient. Their plan was akin to moving the deck chairs around on the Titanic.
Here was the question: Wouldn’t it make more sense to address the root causes of chronic disease that are driving the costs, rather than trying to clean up after the fact? The room of 300 people went silent. It was as if I had just revealed the meaning of life. Afterward the panel moderator, the dean of Columbia University’s School of Public Health, told me how profound this insight was and how all the health leaders were talking about it after. Really? I was shocked. This is so obvious, yet no one had thought of it.
The World Economic Forum estimated that between 2010 and 2030 the global health care costs for chronic disease will exceed $47 trillion9 (probably an underestimate given the new, more robust analysis of $95 trillion over 35 years for the United States alone). They declared this the single biggest threat to global economic development. General Motors spends more on health care than on steel, and Starbucks spends more on health care than on coffee beans!
Other analyses from global management consulting firm McKinsey put the global cost of obesity at $2 trillion a year, which is roughly equivalent to the global impact from smoking, armed violence, war, and terrorism combined.10 In addition, according to the McKinsey Global Institute report, obesity accounts for $2 trillion in lost productivity.11 Any way you slice it, the costs of obesity and chronic disease are weighing the world down.
We think of these problems as diseases of affluence, but the fact is that the greatest burden, or about 80 percent of obesity and chronic disease, is in the developing world, in low- and middle-income countries. They face what the World Health Organization (WHO) classifies as the “double burden of obesity and malnutrition” and are completely unprepared for this epidemic. There is little health care infrastructure, few doctors and nurses to treat these problems, and even less money.
The “cheap” food that causes disease is not so cheap after all. The hope and promise of the Green Revolution—to use agricultural technology to create abundant cheap food to feed the world—turned out to have horrible unintended consequences. In fact, cheap food turns out to be very, very expensive.
Yes, chronic disease is costly. And kills millions. But that is only a small part of the total cost driven by our food system. Add to these costs the real cost of our food system on the environment, economy, climate, social justice issues, poverty, education, national security, and so on, and this number grows dramatically. Let’s explore some of the costs.
THE COSTS WE PAY FOR FARMWORKERS AND FOOD WORKERS
Farmworkers and food industry workers are underpaid and exploited. They face high risks of injury and harm from agricultural chemicals. Most aren’t protected by minimum wage or overtime pay requirements. (However, New York State recently passed the Farm Laborers Fair Labor Practices Act.12) Many farmworkers live below the poverty line and have no health care, instead depending on emergency rooms and Medicaid. The truth is that the food system disproportionately affects the poor, immigrants, and people of color who actually work in the food system.
The average restaurant worker makes only about $10 an hour.13 That’s why we pay their salary through billions in tips and another $16.5 billion in food stamps. Their dependence on food stamps limits their food choices at the checkout counter, and healthy options are often not affordable enough or government approved.
For those who work on a farm—there are 1 million farmworkers in our country—they have one of the most dangerous jobs in America. They die at seven times the rate of other workers.14 The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that 10,000 to 20,000 farmworkers are harmed by acute pesticide poisoning every year, which doesn’t account for the long-term effects of being exposed to toxins day after day and year after year.15 The herbicides and pesticides that farmers use on their crops are neurotoxins, carcinogens, and hormone disruptors. Many of those used in the United States are banned in other countries. The government agencies (the Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, and EPA) that should be regulating these chemicals for human safety are not doing their job.
THE LOSS OF BIODIVERSITY IN NATURAL AND AGRICULTURAL SYSTEMS: WHY IT MATTERS
While these chemical inputs damage human health, they also disrupt natural ecosystems, deplete the diversity of life in the soil, threaten the loss of most of the plant and animal species we have consumed for millennia, and severely affect pollinators, like honeybees and butterflies, we depend on for agricultural crops.16 (Chapter 16 explains these consequences in depth.) But the loss of biodiversity, the result of industrial agriculture, is a much bigger problem that threatens global food security. Not only are we threatening insects essential for agricultural production but we are also losing varieties of plant foods and animals at an alarming rate.
According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), more than 90 percent of plant varieties and half of livestock varieties have been lost to farmers (and the world).17 Most of our food comes from just twelve plant varieties and five animal species, threatening our food security. Thirty percent of livestock breeds are facing extinction, and six breeds become extinct each month. Just three crops (wheat, corn, rice) account for 60 percent of our food. This occurred because of the centralization of seed production (farmers can’t even collect, store, or breed their own plants) by corporations such as Monsanto (now Bayer) as part of the “improvement” of agriculture promoted globally through the Green Revolution and the industrialization of agriculture. Most farmers no longer grow local, resilient, genetically diverse and nutrient-dense varieties. They use only genetically uniform (or GMO) high-yield varieties that require intensive use of fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides—further destroying the organic matter and biodiversity of the soil that results in less nutrient-dense plants and increased need for irrigation and fertilizer. In all ecosystems, complexity is health; simplicity makes systems vulnerable. Think of monocrop corn (meaning it’s the only crop grown on a farm) compared to a rain forest. One plant dies in a rain forest, no problem. One plant dies on a monocrop corn or soy megafarm—no food.
How do we even measure the costs to human health and the threats to our pollinators and the loss of biodiversity? No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals—no more humans.
BEYOND JUST THE HEALTH CARE AND SICKNESS COSTS
Before we get too deep into all the additional costs and harm of our food system, the good news is there are solutions that can solve all these problems. In other words, a food fix! It is a complex set of related strategies for citizens, businesses, philanthropists, and governments to fix our food system that can occur on a global level. It will not be easy, but it is necessary for our survival as a species, for the economic and political stability of national governments, and for the health of the planet.
The costs of the food system are not borne by the companies that cause these problems. Nor are they paid for at the grocery store or restaurant. They are paid for by all of us indirectly through the loss of our social capital (human happiness, health, productivity, etc.), our natural capital (health of our soil, air, water, climate, oceans, biodiversity, etc.), our economic capital (our ability to address economic disparities and social, environmental, educational, and health care problems), threats to national security, and more.
The silver lining in Food Fix is the potential for “the fix” to be an enormous driver of economic growth and innovation. Billions of dollars in investment are flooding into the food and agriculture sectors, creating new businesses, jobs, and national and global economic growth for innovations in farming, food manufacturing, retail, restaurants, health care, and wellness that improve the health of people and the planet. And the side effect will be significant economic growth and jobs from entire new industries and trillions in cost savings by addressing chronic disease; restoring ecosystems that include soil, water, and biodiversity; and reversing climate change. The countries that get this right will not only help humans and the earth, but leap ahead in the twenty-first-century economy for jobs and economic growth.
In Food Fix we will unpack how all these factors contribute to suffering and lack in the world. We will learn how we as citizens, businesses, philanthropists, and governments can begin to restore the health of our people, our communities, our economies, and the environment. There is a Jewish concept called tikkun olam
Genre:
- "Dr. Hyman deftly describes the web of destruction caused by our modern food system -- and how to reverse the tide and save our health and planet. His most important book to date."—Dariush Mozaffarian, MD, DrPH, Friedman School of Nutrition Science & Policy, Tufts University
- "The revolution starts with what we put on our plates and into our bodies. But even before that, it starts with Food Fix. Read this book if you're ready to change the world."—Tim Ryan, US Representative (OH)
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"Food Fix is a wake up call, alerting us to the flawed food system that ensnares us all. Dr. Mark Hyman has not just the diagnosis but the remedies we need. I'm hoping his crucial message will give us a recipe that can fix our food."
—Daniel Goleman -
"Dr. Hyman is a modern-day Hippocrates, a pied piper with a clarion call to heal ourselves with healthy food and good habits, as well to rethink and realign our food system to support greater health in the world. His voice is at once fresh, powerful, informed, passionate, and encouraging, and his book a must read for us all."
—Walter Robb, Stonewall Robb Advisors, Former co-CEO of Whole Foods Market - "Dr. Mark Hyman pulls no punches in this eye-opening journey through the food system, revealing the jungle behind the grocery aisle, farmer's market, cafeteria, and anywhere we find food. While in his past books he helped us realize the joy and benefits of healthy eating, this book takes a deep dive into the hidden politics, vested corporate interests, and broken regulations that create confusion and distrust about what we are fed, both in terms of food and information. Food Fix argues that food inequities increase risks for chronic diseases, which contributes to social unrest, mental health disorders, educational inequities, and even violence and crime. The good news is that with each ugly reveal, Dr. Hyman proposes practical solutions. If you want to know what's under the sheets of our food system and what needs to be done to repair the mess, read this book. If you are part of the problem: run -- Food Fix is coming after you. I highly recommend the fascinating probe into the world behind our food."—William W. Li, author of Eat to Beat Disease
- "Our food system went to Dr. Mark Hyman for a check-up, and in Food Fix he diagnoses chronic influence-peddling, inflammation of the profit motive (the money-grubbing has metastasized), sclerosis of the lower politician, and a severely ruptured public interest. Read this book. Then take two actions and tweet him in the morning."—Ken Cook, President and Co-founder, Environmental Working Group (EWG)
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"Few issues are as important as the food the world grows, transports, wastes, and consumes, and few people can capture this picture, and can be as creative with solutions as Mark Hyman. This is a powerful call to arms."
—Kelly D. Brownell, PhD, Director of World FoodPolicy Center - "Food Fix by Dr. Mark Hyman is a provocative yet transformational analysis of our food system, from farm to table. While some of the proposals to change our food system are controversial, the book represents one of the first substantive and thoughtful attempts to tie the often stove-piped subjects of food, medicine, health, and sustainable agriculture into a holistic approach to feed a hungry and healthy global population."—Dan Glickman, Former Secretary of Agriculture (1995-2001)
- "Dr. Mark Hyman brilliantly unmasks the corruption in our food system. Read this book to impact your health and the world around you."—Vani Hari, author of The Food Babe Way
- "Mark Hyman may be our leading physician social visionary. In his most important book yet, he shows how our food economy could be reshaped to make us more prosperous and, more important, healthier."—Lawrence H. Summers
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"An authoritative, illuminating account of how greed and cynicism have poisoned our food and devastated our minds, our bodies, and our planet, paired with inspiring examples of how we can reverse the damage, restore our health, and heal our world. Food Fix is profoundly disturbing and vitally important."
—James S. Gordon, MD, psychiatrist and author of The Transformation -
"In spite of daily breakthroughs in medicine, we continue to see an increase in cancers, heart disease, and other chronic conditions. It's time to consider not just what we eat, but how it's farmed and how we are using our land in the process. Food Fix gives us an outline of what we need to consider to both fulfill our needs and preserve our planet."
—Governor Christine Todd Whitman, former Administrator of the EPA - "Food Fix shines a light on what is happening with our food system while sharing ways for readers to make a real change. Dr. Hyman's book inspires us to set out on a path to improve our personal health and, at the same time, the health of our planet."—Gisele Bündchen, author of Lessons: My Path to a Meaningful Life and global environmentalist
- "If you're overwhelmed by the scale of the world's problems, and wondering what you can do in your own life to start, Food Fix is for you. Dr. Hyman deftly connects the dots between education, health, climate science, and the food we eat every day, showing that the choices we make about the food we put on our plates have consequences that ripple around the world."—Arianna Huffington, founder and CEO of Thrive Global
- "Our global food system has produced an unhealthy planet, thanks to the food industry's push for unsustainable ultra-processed food. Food Fix highlights the need to focus on what we put on our plates as a way to improve our diets, our health, and the health of the planet."—Barry M. Popkin, PhD, W. R. Kenan, Jr., Distinguished Professor of Nutrition, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- "Mark Hyman has been teaching us how to eat healthier, feel better, and live longer for years. While nutrition is still a major focus in Food Fix, he also encourages us to think about how our food is produced, prepared, and purchased. I highly recommend it. It is a great read."—Ann M. Veneman, Former Secretary of Agriculture
- "A tour de force read that exposes how food and food systems are at the center of our most pressing problems, impacting the health of people, our environment, and even our national security. Food Fix boldly demonstrates how changing what -- and how -- we eat can literally change the world."—Bill Frist, MD, Former Majority Leader US Senate
- "In an increasingly polarized and anxious world, Food Fix is a beacon of hope and inspiration, serving up a pragmatic and clear-eyed assessment of where we are, and how changing the way we eat and think about food, can take us where we need to go."—Deepak Chopra
- "Dr. Hyman's diagnostic skills are on full display in this brilliant book. He's connected the pandemic of chronic human disease with the many expressions of our environmental crisis, for which his urgent prescription is regenerative agriculture. Reading this book should give all of us great hope for personal and planetary healing, and thank you, Mark, for shining your light on our path forward."—Tom Newmark, Chairman of The Carbon Underground and past Chair of Greenpeace Fund US
- "Dr. Hyman's provocative perspective on the power of food to fix us and our planet is an influential read."—Mehmet Oz, MD
- "It may have occurred to you that you need to change your diet, for your own health or the planet's. This volume will give you both a nudge in that direction, and some straightforward guidance for getting underway!"—Bill McKibben, author of Falter
- "Dr. Hyman is a unique leader in the food world, building bridges between disparate viewpoints, creating connections between different worlds, and using this to construct an original plan for how we can all move forward towards better health, not only for ourselves but also for the planet. Food Fix ranges masterfully across different fields, offering, ultimately, a sense of hope and an inspiring vision for the future."—Nina Teicholz, author of The Big Fat Surprise
- "Food Fix is a brilliantly researched feast of facts about the most critically overlooked cause of chronic disease, global warming, and environmental degradation. It is also the Fix, demonstrating that the food sector is an astonishing yet overlooked basis for transforming agriculture, health care, mental illness, biodiversity loss, education, and economic well-being. It is a rare book, a momentous work that will inform and improve the lives of every reader, society, and country."—Paul Hawken, editor of Drawdown
- On Sale
- Feb 8, 2022
- Page Count
- 400 pages
- Publisher
- Little Brown Spark
- ISBN-13
- 9780316453141
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