Our health has been hijacked from us, taken from us slowly, quietly, over the past century. Our current food, social, family, school, work, faith-based, and community environments, health care institutions, and government policies make it hard for us to make healthy choices. We are presented with choices that foster bad habits. But together, getting and staying healthy is possible given the right information, tools, support, and collective action to take back our health.
Our food choices are influenced by government subsidies for agricultural mass production of poor-quality fats and sugars. The government food pyramid reflects industry interests, not science, although the 2010 Dietary Guidelines report and the new “my plate” initiative take a step in the right direction, recommending a plant-based, whole-foods diet with less meat, sugar, and refined foods. On the other hand, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not protected us from harmful pharmaceutical influence. Avandia, the number one diabetes drug in the world, has been allowed to stay on the market in the United States, even after it has been shown to cause 47,000 deaths from heart disease since it was introduced in 1999.
During the health care reform process, Dr. Dean Ornish, founder of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute; Dr. Michael Roizen, Chief Wellness Officer of the Cleveland Clinic; and I helped Senators Harkin, Wyden, and Cornyn introduce the Take Back Your Health Act of 2009, designed to reimburse patients with heart disease, diabetes, and pre-diabetes for intensive lifestyle treatment. Net savings in direct health care costs were estimated at $930 billion over 10 years. The bill was left on the cutting room floor of the Senate in last-minute horse trading. Afterward, in a two-hour meeting with Senator Harkin, I insisted that our only goal was to have policy reflect science. He paused for a moment and remarked, “That would make too much sense.”
Health is a human right that is neglected and undervalued. It is time to take it back.
No single change will help us take back our health. Pharmaceutical companies continually promise the next breakthrough on diabetes, obesity, and heart disease, yet we inevitably end up disappointed by new drugs’ meager benefits or disillusioned by their unexpected harm. The food and diet industry promise slick new quick fixes: just eat this one thing or do this one super exercise and your problems and pounds will melt away. But there will never be one quick fix.
It is the hundreds of little choices we make every day that will transform our collective health—and have some good side effects such as preventing economic collapse, climate change, and environmental degradation; reinvigorating families, communities, and faith-based organizations; and reversing the epidemic of obesity and chronic disease weighing down our planet. By making choices as individuals, families, and communities, we can force change. Demand for healthier food, for example, has convinced the giant retailer Walmart to offer organic and lower-sugar and -fat products. It’s that kind of pressure that forces change in large swaths of the economy (including food growers and producers) and reduces the toxic burden on the environment.
Through our collective action and online tools such as those at www.takebackourhealth.org, we can communicate with our elected representatives and link to resources to help us create change at the local and national levels. Here are some specific steps we can take or demand through our words, actions, and votes.
Contribute your own ideas at www.takebackourhealth.org and help build the movement for all of us to take back our health.
Take Action! It Is Time to Take Back Our Health for Our Bodies
One in two Americans has pre-diabetes or diabetes. One in three children born today will have diabetes. Chronic lifestyle-preventable and -treatable diseases kill 50 million people a year. It is time to take action.
- Follow the six-week plan in The Blood Sugar Solution. Create health through food, supplements, exercise, stress management tools, and reduced exposure to toxins. Balance your body’s systems.
- Vote every day with your fork. What you put on your fork has the most impact on your health, our economic prosperity, and the health of the environment.
- Cut down on screen time. Invest more time in self-care, learning how to cook, taking a walk, dancing in your living room, trying yoga, practicing deep breathing exercises, or connecting with your loved ones or friends.
Take Action! It Is Time to Take Back Our Health for Our Families
You have total control over what you bring into your home, and what you choose to do there. Small changes can have a big impact on your family’s health and happiness and on the food industry, agriculture, and marketing practices.
- Eat at home. In 1900, 2 percent of all meals were eaten outside the home. In 2010, 50 percent were eaten away from home. One in five eat breakfast from McDonald’s. Family meals happen about three times a week, last less than 20 minutes, and are spent watching television or texting while each family member eats a different microwaved “food” made in a different factory. We complain of not having enough time to cook, but Americans spend more time watching cooking shows on The Food Network than actually preparing their own meals.
- Eat together. No matter how modest the meal, create a special place to sit down together, and set the table with care and respect. Family meals are a time for empathy and generosity, a time to nourish and communicate. Research shows that children who have regular meals with their parents do better in every way, from better grades to healthier relationships to staying out of trouble, and are 42 percent less likely to drink, 50 percent less likely to smoke, and 66 percent less likely to smoke pot. Regular family dinners protect girls from bulimia, anorexia, and diet pills. Family dinners reduce the incidence of childhood obesity. In a study on household routines and obesity in American preschool-aged children, kids as young as four had a lower risk of obesity if they ate regular family dinners, had enough sleep, and didn’t watch television on weekdays. Taking back our family dinners will help us learn how to find and prepare real food quickly and simply, teach our children how to connect, and build security, safety, and social skills, meal after meal, day after day.
- Reclaim your kitchen. Throw out foods with high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated fats, and sugars or fat as the first or second ingredient on the label. Fill your kitchen with real, fresh, whole, local foods whenever possible. Join a community-supported agricultural network to get a cheaper supply of fresh vegetables, or shop at nearby farmers’ markets.
- Plant a garden. It’s the tastiest, most nutritious, most environmentally friendly food you will ever eat. You can create a small garden in a box on your roof or porch if you have limited space.
- Conserve, compost, and recycle. Bring your own shopping bags to the market and recycle your paper, cans, bottles, and plastic. Start a compost bucket (and find out where in your community you can share this rich fertilizer).
Take Action! It Is Time to Take Back Our Health in Our Communities
We live in communities without sidewalks, or where it is not safe to walk down the street, or where we must walk five miles to find a vegetable. Many live in communities where the only “grocery store” is the convenience store at a gas station. We must navigate miles of aisles in grocery stores filled with different variations of sugar, fat, salt, and coloring disguised as food, all of which are scientifically proven to cause disease and premature death. There are ten McDonald’s restaurants within ten miles of my house, and I live in a remote country location.
- Get healthy together. Small groups are the catalyst that will make everything easier. Create your own group of friends, coworkers, or church, mosque, synagogue, or community members to support your journey to wellness. Learn how at www.takebackourhealth.org.
- Create virtual groups. Learn how to start a group on Facebook or other social networks at www.takebackourhealth.org.
- Start a dinner or cooking club. Take turns with other families or friends to cook healthy, tasty meals once a week.
Take Action! It Is Time to Take Back Our Health from Media and Food Industry Marketing Practices
The average kid spends seven and a half hours a day in front of a screen watching billions of dollars in advertising for foods of the poorest nutritional quality.1 Overweight kids eat 50 percent of their meals in front of the television. Teaching our children every day about healthy nutrition cannot compete with the marketing onslaught. Thomas Frieden, MD, director of the Centers for Disease Control, recommends that we prohibit food marketing to children.
- Restrict all media marketing of liquid calories, fast food, junk food, and processed food, especially to children. Our senses are inundated with food industry marketing practices that mostly succeed in convincing us that their health-sapping options are easy, fun, and affordable and will make us stronger and happier. We have taken the bait. One billion cans of Coca-Cola are consumed every day around the world. In communities without health care, education, running water, or enough food, there is Coke! Food marketing directed at children should be banned (through the Federal Trade Commission). This has been done in over 50 countries across the globe, including Australia, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Sweden. We should follow suit.
- Restrict unproven health claims on labels. Foods with health claims on the label are often the least healthy. Adding a little fiber to a sugary cereal doesn’t make it healthy. Will Vitamin Water or Gatorade, made cool by Kobe Bryant and Lebron James, make our kids super athletes or just super fat? The FDA should restrict health claims.
- Do a media fast. Avoid all media for a week (or two) with your family, or create a media fast group at work or school.
Take Action! It Is Time to Take Back Our Health in Our Schools
Schools have become hazardous zones full of empty calories, junk food, and stripped-down physical education programs. When most school kitchens have only deep fryers, microwaves, and displays for candy and junk food at the checkout counters, how can children stay healthy? When the food served is as addictive as heroin or cocaine, who is accountable? General Jack Keane, former Vice Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, shared with me that 70 percent of the applicants for the military are unfit to serve. The school lunch program was started in 1946 because military recruits were too thin to serve in the military; now, in part because of our school lunch program, our children are too fat to serve.
- Help reinvent school lunch programs. The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 removes junk food from schools by applying nutrition standards to all foods sold in schools (including vending machines in hallways), and supports access to fresh produce through farm-to-school networks, the creation of school gardens, and the use of local foods. It doesn’t solve the void in education for self-care and nutrition, but it is a beginning. Watch the movie Two Angry Moms to learn how to take back the lunchroom.
- Support schools as safe zones. Give students access only to foods that promote health and optimal brain functioning.
- Support changes in zoning laws. Prevent fast-food and junk-food outlets from operating next to schools.
- Support “eat only in lunchroom” policies for schools. Studies have shown that when school districts prohibit eating in hallways and classrooms, children lose 10 percent of their body weight without ANY other change in diet or exercise.
- Build school gardens. Teach children about the origins of food and let them experience the sensory delight of real, garden-fresh fruits and vegetables.
- Support the integration of self-care and nutrition curriculum into schools. Work with your local or regional school boards to introduce programs like Mehmet Oz’s HealthCorps into schools around the country.
- Bring back basic cooking skills to schools. Make these skills part of a curriculum that includes essential life tools.
Take Action! It Is Time to Take Back Our Health in Our Workplaces
Workplaces are dangerous environments. Bowls of chips, fridges full of sugar-laden caffeinated sodas, cafeterias with hardly a vegetable in sight, drawers full of candy, and high-stress environments all fuel our ill health. E-mail and BlackBerries tether us mentally and physically to work 24/7. One large company human resources director told me they were planning on blocking employees’ access to e-mail when they went on vacation.
When Starbucks spends more on health care than on coffee beans and General Motors spends more on health care than on steel, something has to change. Corporations have the most to gain by investing in creating healthier environments, building wellness programs, and allowing for default choices that support health.
- Identify and train wellness champions in the workplace. These individuals can lead support groups for employees to get healthy together by following The Blood Sugar Solution online course.
- Improve workplace food culture by improving snack areas and cafeteria offerings. Provide more real, fresh food and less processed, sugary food. Support workplace lunch potlucks to share the burden and cost of creating healthy lunches and strengthen community within organizations.
- Develop incentives (including financial) for employees to participate in wellness programs. Safeway’s Steve Burd implemented financial incentives for healthy lifestyle change for his employees called Healthy Measures.2 If this type of program was implemented nationally, it would shave $550 billion a year off our health care bill.
- Support the development of work-based self-care and group support programs. Companies are starting to understand that solving the problem of poor health is not a cost or liability but an investment opportunity. Presenteeism, being at the job but not on the job, costs companies two to three times its direct medical costs, mostly from lost productivity owing to obesity and depression-related symptoms such as fatigue, brain fog, and low motivation. Globally, companies lose $2 trillion a year in productivity from lifestyle-preventable conditions. Workplace wellness efforts can yield 1,000–2,000 percent returns on investment. The World Economic Forum created a Wellness App to show companies how much they can save by creating wellness programs (http://wellness.weforum.org).
Take Action! It Is Time to Take Back Our Health in Our Places of Worship
Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body. (1 Cor. 6:19–20)
Pastor Rick Warren of Saddleback Church, a congregation of 30,000, made a radical assertion as we launched The Daniel Plan (see Chapter 16). God wants us to be healthy. In his sermon, he pointed out that in the world’s major Western religious traditions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—there are teachings on ethics, compassion, and spirituality, supporting the mind and spirit. But in synagogues, churches, temples, and mosques around the world, health and the body are rarely discussed. No rabbi, priest, minister, pastor, or imam encourages care of the body as well as the soul. Church and temple functions are centers of community activity, yet they provide an abundance of poor-quality, calorie-rich, starchy, sugary foods that help their members get to heaven early.
- Encourage care of the body as well as the soul. Social change often begins in faith-based organizations—abolition, civil rights, and human rights. But health is the most neglected of all human rights. The community, connections, and social networks that already exist within faith-based organizations can support health of the mind, spirit, and body.
- Add “body study” to Bible study groups. Incorporate “body” and soul into small support and study groups within faith-based communities. You can study a healthy lifestyle curriculum like The Daniel Plan (www.danielplan.com).
- Create a culture of wellness within faith-based organizations. Encourage healthy food at gatherings and events. Create fitness activities to do together. Follow some of the examples we used at Saddleback Church (www.danielplan.com).
Take Action! It Is Time to Take Back Our Health in Our Democracy
I was invited along with other experts in prevention and wellness to the White House Forum on Prevention and Wellness in June 2009. As part of our effort to create true health care change, we advocated for an interagency council to support, coordinate, and develop health promotion and wellness movements across all government agencies. In June 2010, President Obama established the National Council on Prevention, Health Promotion, and Public Health, and Senator Tom Harkin nominated me for a presidential appointment to a 25-person group to advise the administration and the new council. This is a step in the right direction. But there is more we can do.
Send letters and e-messages to your elected representatives to support health initiatives such as:
- Eliminating unhealthy foods from all schools, child care, and health care facilities, and all government institutions. The government must establish rigorous standards for school nutrition consistent with current science (through the USDA). Similarly, we need to create nutrition programs for other public and government-run institutions such as the military, Veterans Affairs, the Indian Health Service, and community health centers.
- Supporting lobby reform. We must change campaign finance laws so that corporate political donations from entities such as Big Food, Big Farming, and Big Pharma can no longer control the political process.
- Subsidizing the production of fruits and vegetables. Change the Farm Bill. Agricultural policies should support public health and encourage the production of fruits and vegetables, not commodity products such as corn and soy. Eighty percent of government subsidies presently go to soy and corn, which are used to create much of the junk food we consume. We need to rethink subsidies and provide more for smaller farmers and a broader array of fruits and vegetables.
- Incentivizing supermarkets to open in poor communities. Poverty and obesity go hand in hand. One reason for this is the food deserts we see around the nation. Poor people have a right to high-quality food, too. We need to create ways to provide it to them.
- Building the real cost of industrial food into the price. Include its impact on health care costs and lost productivity.
- Taxing sugar. We tax cigarettes and alcohol, and this helps pay for prevention and treatment programs. Sugar is at least as addictive, if not more so. Scientists suggest a penny-an-ounce tax on sugar-sweetened beverages. This would reduce sugar consumption, obesity, and health care costs, and provide revenue to support programs for the prevention and treatment of obesity and chronic disease.
- Creating a public health advertising campaign. Let’s make being healthy cool and sexy and expose the subversive practices of Big Food, Big Farming, and Big Pharma. Use the advertising techniques that best speak to the emotional needs of the consumer and our children.
- Supporting the creation of a health corps. Our goal should be to train 1 million health workers and champions in communities around the country by 2020. Through the act of getting healthy together, we can create a double revolution—change the medicine we do (lifestyle and functional medicine) and change how we do medicine (in small support groups). This new workforce of community health workers would “accompany” and support individuals in making better food and lifestyle choices and cleaning up their homes, workplaces, schools, faith-based organizations, and environment.
Take Action! It Is Time to Take Back Our Health from the “Sick Care” System
Marcia Angell, former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, wrote a scathing critique of the infiltration of Big Pharma into medical research, education, and health and drug policy.3 Aside from the $30 billion a year spent on marketing pharmaceuticals to physicians (known as “continuing medical education”), Big Pharma has turned many academic researchers into hired hands. Though leaders from academic medical centers are provided grants to do research “contracted for” by Pharma, the research is often designed, executed, and ghostwritten by the funders. The conflict-of-interest statements of authors on research articles now often run several pages long. These authors not only receive grants but also sit on corporate advisory boards, receive large speaking fees, and enter into patent and royalty agreements with Pharma.
It would appear that our evidence-based medicine isn’t based on very good evidence. We have the power to change that.
- Fix perverse financial incentives in health care reimbursement. In New York City, a very successful diabetes prevention and treatment program was implemented. It resulted in fewer complications, hospitalizations, and amputations. But the program was stopped by the hospital because its revenue dropped. Cutting off a diabetic toe and receiving $6,000 from Medicare is better than being reimbursed $100 for a nutrition consult. The system profits from having more sick and fat patients.
- Support real health care reform. We need to change not only insurance regulation, but also the type of medicine we do (lifestyle and functional medicine) and how we deliver health care (in small groups, in communities, and in health care organizations). During the health reform process in Washington, DC, Dean Ornish, Michael Roizen, and I were asked what organization we represented. We replied simply that we didn’t represent anyone but the patients or anything but the science. They accepted it, but looked perplexed. No wonder. During health care reform, the pharmaceutical industry had three lobbyists for every member of Congress and spent over $600,000 a day to make sure their needs were represented in the legislation.
- Mandate nutrition and lifestyle medicine training in medical schools and residency programs. As we know, all of the major drivers of disease and health care costs are lifestyle-preventable factors. If these factors were addressed, we could eliminate 90 percent of the heart disease and diabetes. Yet only one in four medical schools has a nutrition course, and only 28 percent of schools meet the minimum 25 hours of nutrition education recommended by the National Academy of Sciences.4 Most of those nutrition hours address diseases of nutritional deficiency such as scurvy and rickets. If we were successful in reducing heart disease by half or reducing diabetes (along with its complications) by 80 percent, hospitals would go bankrupt, Pharma would see their profits plummet, and many physicians would be forced to start “institutes of lifestyle medicine,” not more heart surgery hospitals.
- Support and develop a modular scalable nutrition curriculum. If food is our most powerful medicine, then educating health care professionals about nutrition is essential. We must develop and provide funding to support a nutrition curriculum built for people in the health care industry. This will address the lack of supply of adequate experts. (We could scale existing programs such as those provided by the Institute for Functional Medicine.)
- Provide reimbursement for lifestyle treatment of chronic disease. Despite the support of nearly all the major medical societies who joined in publishing a review of the scientific evidence for lifestyle medicine, for the prevention and treatment of chronic disease,5 this approach is still not part of medical training or practice. We need to have lifestyle treatments like the one outlined in this book paid for if they are going to become a part of mainstream medical practice.
- Develop more funding for nutritional science. Congress should mandate greater funding for nutritional science, and examine and test innovative treatment models. Responsibility for dietary policy should be placed with an independent scientific group such as the Institute of Medicine instead of with the politically and corporately influenced U.S. Department of Agriculture. In the 1980s, they advised a low-fat diet food pyramid with at least 8–11 servings a day of bread, rice, pasta, and cereal, which coincided with the rapid increase in obesity and diabetes. It was lethal to mix politics and health recommendations.
- End irresponsible relationships between medicine and industry. Public health organizations such as the American Heart Association and the American Dietetic Association should avoid partnerships, endorsements, or financial ties with industry that compromises their independence and credibility. Coca-Cola sponsoring events at the American Dietetic Association, or the American Heart Association promoting sugary cereals as heart healthy because they have a few grains of whole wheat—is this credible?
Take Back Our Health: Be Part of the Movement, Be Part of the Conversation
Any one act by any one individual or organization will not be enough to create change. I am reminded of what Mother Teresa once said: “There are no great acts; only small acts done with great love.”
One step, one choice, one change at a time. One word, one action, one vote at a time.
Go to www.takebackourhealth.org to take the first step, join the movement, and learn how we can and must get healthy together.