Top Three Problems

1. Preventable, serious food-related diseases - fostered by processed foods and added sugar - have proliferated, partially due to misinformation and unethical marketing.
2. Treating these diseases overwhelms / imperils our fragile healthcare system; preventive approaches severely lacking.
3. Public lacks access to good food / unbiased nutrition information.  Cause-and-effect relationship between excess sugar, processed foods, and resulting illness poorly understood.

Overview

• Big problem: international scope requiring local, personal, targeted solutions.
• Lack of strategic intelligence, vision, resources and organized, coordinated approach.
• Difficult to visualize / simplify problem in lay terms.
• Wrong conversation deployed e.g. obesity, energy imbalance, counting calories.
• Sophisticated, well-financed psychology / marketing used by food system actors.

Food-Related Disease Proliferating

• Non-Communicable Disease rates highest in human history: 35 million deaths annually.
• 25% of humanity has metabolic disease; minorities, poor, & children at greatest risk.
• Reluctance to speak out / translate science to general population, mass media.
• Lack of prevention focus, especially on link to real food as health essential.
• Medicine lacks serious nutrition science - only 19% of U.S. medical schools require nutrition courses; content often inaccurate. Medicine slow to incorporate new science.

Processed Food

• Failed experiment - global impacts with epic consequences: human & environmental.
• Chemical industry - food supply driven by chemists / flooded with additives.
• Current business model, food formularies promoting cheap food and disease, not health.
• Food processing reduces nutritional value while driving up short-sighted profit margins.

Sugar

• Current consumption levels are dangerous; few understand to what extent.
• Consumption crossroads - negative global financial impacts / market risk factors rising.
• Consumers in the dark about sugar addiction: 56 names; science inscrutable to lay people; lack of transparent labeling, reasonable limits, and adequate warnings; understanding of added sugar vs. intrinsic sugar; detrimental effects on the body.
• Public unaware of recommendations by leading scientists and health institutions.
• Food companies throttle healthcare / market oversight, regulation, consumer protection.

Food Industry

• Corrupted / burdened by short-term interests limited to only one bottom line: profit.
• Industrial pandemic – food & beverage industry now leading vector for disease.
• Perniciousness / malfeasance - powerful advertising and spurious science dominate global conversations about food and nutrition. Industry controlling government policy.
• Consumers deliberately misinformed - left alone to sort smoke, noise, and lies from truth and science. Most vulnerable targeted with unhealthy and harmful products.

What are the solutions? Please click here.