Never has a society so mishandled basic, preventative measures like nutrition research and so overmedicated the ailing masses that are a result. It’s like sending your teenager out on the road without driving instruction and then spending $1200 to fix your car when he inevitably crashes (Bloomberg estimates this is how much Americans spend per year on prescription drugs). It defies common sense.
According to recent in-depth reporting by Politico, the government has spent a steadily decreasing percentage of its budget on nutrition research over the past few decades. As early as 1978, researchers called for strengthening the position of nutrition research and increasing funding, warning that otherwise we’d have a health epidemic on our hands. And that’s exactly what’s happened. 2018 spending on nutrition research by the NIH? About $2 billion. 2018 spending on pharmaceutical R&D? Almost $80 billion. Watch cable TV for 15 minutes or navigate to almost any website and you’ll be bombarded with pharmaceutical ads. The industry is a behemoth. We’re neglecting common sense prevention in favor of rampaging profit motivation.
Across the country there are food deserts where residents don’t have access to fresh, whole foods. Across the country, there are people with access to fresh, whole foods who are instead addicted to sugar and fast calories. Rethinking our relationship to food is fundamental to the MetaRepublic and we’ll address issues here like updating dietary recommendations. We’ll look into research that shows that all sugars are not equal, so that when you do choose sweets, you can choose more wisely. With your participation, we can remedy poor nutrition education — as with the MetaRepublic as a whole, it’s in our hands.
One Reply to “What’s Wrong with America: Diet & Nutrition”
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Kate- Excellent post! I just wanted to add a comment about patents, and their role in setting our priorities. If we just rely on the private marketplace to set our health priorities, then of course pharmaceuticals win out over foods and proper nutrition. Pharmaceuticals can be owned by a private company. Vitamin D cannot be owned. So research into Vitamin D or fructose goes unheralded outside academia, and not promoted in our advertising culture. We need collective action to research our common heritage– all the molecules that cannot be patented because, essentially, they are old and well known, and already in common use. Using government money to subsidize the pharmaceutical industry instead of nutrition is a great example of regulatory capture and legalized corruption.