#021 Food: A Manifesto (Part 1)

Why thinking more deeply about food is vital to everyone's wellbeing

So last week I had knee surgery to repair a torn MCL – which has meant not much walking, no driving, no lifting my giant toddler (woot!), and a LOT of sitting on the couch with a book and a cup of tea. I have had a week off so far, and it is amazing how long a week feels when you don’t do much except decide what book to read next and whether to make coffee or tea…

There was a strong theme in the books I have read recently – food! Specifically, how the food systems we have in place and what we eat (or don’t eat) can affect our wellbeing.

I have always been interested in the interactions between what we eat and our health and wellbeing. And since studying an entire subject* dedicated to nutrition as part of the lifestyle coaching degree I did at the Endeavour College of Natural Health last year, I have become more and more interested in the relationship between food and wellbeing for individuals, for communities, for the economy, and for the planet.

[* and one subject by no means makes me an expert, just a better informed bystander. But interestingly, in Australia medical students receive little or no education on nutrition. And one study in the UK found that more than 70 per cent of British medical students received less than 2 hours of nutrition training in their ENTIRE DEGREES!! So maybe I know more than some, but I digress…]

Food is a touchy subject. And a HUGE subject. Which is why this will be a multi-part post (stay tuned for part 2 (and maybe 3!).

It kinda feels like religion and politics sometimes. It makes people uncomfortable to talk about it.

When I changed what I ate quite drastically 11-ish years ago for health reasons (wholly in response to a family history of heart disease on both sides, including an uncle who died of a heart attack in his early-50s) and became vegetarian, a LOT of people felt the need to justify what they ate to me, in response to what I chose not to eat any more. – which I found fascinating.

But switching my diet is not what this post is about.

It’s about how hard it is to change what we eat because of the systems and the environment we have in place. It’s about how our modern approach to food is making many of us sick.

Image source: Food Unfolded

You might be one of the people who sees someone eating junk food all the time, or someone who is overweight and think that they just need to try harder and eat more healthily. To be honest, when I was younger, I thought this too.

That all of the responsibility lies with the individual. Willpower is key!

I am keen to get people to start thinking about food and what we eat, not as an individual responsibility solely, but as a collective responsibility – for individuals, communities, and government.

Hear me out.

Remember the book Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg? Where, women could have it all – work, life, family – if they just tried hard enough and leaned in to it?

I remember reading it when it came out in 2013, before I was married, before I had 3 kids, and thought, yeah, I can totally lean in and do all the things so I can be and have all the things . But boy have I changed my tune now, and would say I adhere pretty firmly to the Lean Out school of thought…

The book hasn’t aged well because it laid all of the responsibility on individual women and not the huge structural change that needs to take place in order to ensure gender equity is everywhere (from paid parental leave and childcare to tax reform and addressing workforce segregation), not just in pockets where women ‘leaned in’ and made it happen for themselves.

Food is kind of the same. We are told that it is an individual responsibility to eat our 5 serves of vegetables and 2 serves of fruit. To cook more wholesome meals. Or to choose a salad rather than a burger and fries when we go out for a meal. We almost completely ignore the economic, social, and environmental systems in place which heavily influence what we put on our plates.

Why?

Have you ever thought about how much ultra-processed food you eat? And why it is often cheaper than fresh food?

The cheapest and most abundant ingredients in our food system are sugars and refined carbohydrates, like flour and fats. These ingredients are the building blocks of processed foods.

In the UK, 80 per cent of processed food can be classified as ‘unhealthy’. ‘Unhealthy’ products are defined as those that the World Health Organization deems unsuitable to market to children. Highly processed foods - high in salt, refined carbohydrates, sugar, fat, and low in fibre – are on average 3 times cheaper per calorie than healthier foods. This is a key reason why unhealthy diets are an acute problem among the poorest (more on food systems in part 2 of this post).

Why does it matter?

Diet-related disease is now the biggest cause of avoidable illness and death in the developed world. In Australia, poor diet is responsible for 7 per cent of Australia’s disease burden. According to the 2019 Global Burden of Disease Study of 195 countries, dietary factors are the single leading cause of death, exacting an even greater health burden than smoking.

Henry Dimblebey, in his fantastic book Ravenous: How to get ourselves and our planet into shape, writes a lot about the issue of individual vs collective responsibility and illustrates the problem with a tonne of interesting facts and statistics, including:

In 1950, less than 1 per cent of the UK population was clinically obese. Today, that figure stands at 28 per cent. Are we to believe that, in the intervening years, the British public has suffered a massive collapse of willpower? Of course not. People haven’t changed; the food system has.

In Australia, the trend upwards is just as alarming. In 1980, 10 per cent of the population was obese – now 31.3 per cent of the population is. A staggering 66.9 per cent of the Australian population now live with overweight or obesity.

And the problem is projected to get worse over time. The World Obesity Foundation has found that when taking account of increases in population levels and changes in age distributions, and assuming the trends in obesity prevalence continue, the global economic costs of overweight and obesity are predicted to rise from a little under US$ 2 trillion in 2020, to over US$ 3 trillion by 2030, and more than an astonishing US$ 18 trillion by 2060 (all at 2019 prices).

Having obesity makes you more likely to develop metabolic disorders like type 2 diabetes, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, cardiovascular disease, chronic kidney disease, and cancers.

In 2020-21, in Australia, we spent $2.3 billion on type 2 diabetes (largely spent on medication through the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme). For context, in the 2020-21 Budget, Australia allocated $4.9 billion on COVID-19 related health measures, and $240.4 million to boost women’s economic security – so $2.3 billion just on type 2 diabetes is a lot!

According to a 2022 Diabetes Australia report, there has been a 37 per cent increase in people under 40 developing type 2 diabetes over the last 10 years. In the UK, by 2035 the NHS is projected to spend more on treating type 2 diabetes, just one condition caused by bad diet, than it does on all cancers today.

Poor diets are going to cost governments and individuals a LOT of money.

But poor diet leading to overweight or obesity has many more side effects than just economic or lifespan, and can include depression, anxiety, infertility, high blood pressure, painful joints, breathlessness and broken sleep. Plus, cancer, dementia, heart failure, and type 2 diabetes (which has additional risks like blindness, peripheral neuropathy, and limb amputation).

So, we have established that poor diet is a problem and it is getting worse. It affects a lot of people, and the health effects of a poor diet cost a lot of money.

How do we fix it?

Is it more knowledge?

Willpower?

Exercise?

Fix the food system?

Let’s dive into all of this in Part 2!

In the meantime, I will be doing knee rehab and reading more books.

Be well,

Alicia