David L. Katz: A Food System for Dummies | Big Think

David L. Katz: A Food System for Dummies

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The Yale University Director worries that consumers need a PhD to understand what they’re eating. He proposes simplifying food labels so everyone can be a nutritional expert.

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David Katz:

David Katz MD, MPH, FACPM, FACP is an authority on nutrition, weight management, and the prevention of chronic disease, and a leader in integrative medicine and patient-centered care. He is a board certified specialist in both Internal Medicine, and Preventive Medicine/Public Health, and Associate Professor (adjunct) in Public Health Practice at the Yale University School of Medicine.

Katz is the Director and founder of Yale University's Prevention Research Center, Director and founder of the Integrative Medicine Center at Griffin Hospital in Derby, CT, and founder and president of the non-profit Turn the Tide Foundation. He was formerly the Director of Medical Studies in Public Health at the Yale School of Medicine for eight years.

Katz holds five U.S. patents and has published over 200 scientific papers, numerous textbook chapters, 15 books to date, and well over a thousand newspaper columns and blog posts.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: How do we encourage people to eat more nutritious food?

David Katz: In 2003, I was invited by then Secretary of health Tommy Thomson as part of a group of 15 to come to DC sit around the conference table with the secretary, with the commissioner of the FDA with the heads of the NIH and CDC and certain general and go around the table take a turn and offer up a suggestion as to what the FDA could do to combat the trends in obesity and diabetes. So I was there, I participated. It was a great privilege and when my turn came I said, “Mr. Secretary, Mr. Commissioner, Mark McClellan at the time, we need a food supply for dummies. We got everything for dummies in this country. We need a PhD in Nutritional Biochemistry to know which bread to buy if you care about the health of your family.

Now I know this, not any PhD will do because my wife has a PhD from Princeton in neuroscience. But it's not Nutritional Biochemistry. Now, she's a very smart woman, we have five kids, she's been married to me for twenty years. I very much doubt there's too many more sophisticated shoppers in the entire country. And she knows everything there is to know. Even she, periodically comes home from the supermarket with smoke coming out of her ears because she'll say, “David, I know you want the most nutritious bread but listen bud, this one got the most fiber but also has the most sodium, this one has less sodium doesn’t have quite as much fiber but it has high fructose corn syrup, this doesn’t have the high fructose corn syrup it’s got intermediate high fiber, less sodium and although it says euro gram trans fat on the front, it says partially hydrogenated oil in the ingredient list. You want the most nutritious bread, you figure it out which one it is.” Well, that’s just too hard.

We need the food supply for dummies. Convene a multidisciplinary panel of the best nutrition public health experts in the land, give them the support they need, and let them take everything we know about nutrition and express it in symbols as simple as ABC, 123, green, yellow, red, put it in the front of every bag, box, bottle, jar, and can in the food supply so that everyone is a nutrition expert. And then when people know what is truly better for them the question will be, will they care? Let's work on making them care. Let's get out and tell them how much this matters. ‘Cause if they care and they know then they can act. And if they act, if they change their demand, if they voted every cash register in every supermarket in the country, the food supply will change. Because all they really want to do at the end of the day is sell their products and make the customers happy. If it takes something different to make the customers happy, this immutable thing, the typical American diet, the food supply will change. We can change it.

Well they said, “Thanks for coming Dave, don’t call us and we probably won’t call you.” That’s pretty much what happened. Because what we have is the problem between the food supply the way it exist and the entanglements between for example the department of agriculture and large agri-businesses. You know, there’s always a great deal of incentive to preserve the status quo. The military industrial complex, we all heard about that.

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