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By Matthew Rees

Food and Health Fact #149: Why so little advocacy about dietary health?

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It was during last year’s 13-day United Nations climate summit in Glasgow – which brought together multiple heads of state, CEOs, non-profits, and countless others from around the world – that I had a thought: Why aren’t there summits of equal stature focused on preventing the widespread disease and death caused by ultra-processed food and sugar-sweetened beverages?

The real issue isn’t summits, of course (though the UN did hold a nine-hour “food systems” confab last September) but rather the relative silence throughout the world regarding nutritionally-deficient diets. The silence is striking given the nexus between food and health. Want to take a guess as to where diet ranks, globally, as the cause of death? Tenth? Nope. Fifth? Nope. Try first.

“Poor diet is responsible for more deaths globally than tobacco, high blood pressure, or any other health risk,” pointed out the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation upon release of a landmark study on the topic in 2019. (IHME’s founder, Christopher Murray, is also the focus a fabulous book called Epic Measures.)

The study pointed out that in 2017, diet contributed to 10.9 million deaths globally – about 20 percent of all the world’s deaths that year. (The biggest global dietary liabilities? Low intake of grains and fruit, high consumption of sodium, red meat, processed meats, and sugar-sweetened beverages.)

At the risk of making a crude (and oversimplified) comparison, how many deaths are caused climate change? A somewhat random sample of recent studies turns up wildly different numbers. Another IHME study, published last September, came up with a figure of 356,000. A different outfit says 100,000, but one group of researchers says the number is five million. Perhaps most interesting is the UN’s World Meteorological Organization saying there was more than a four-fold decline in annual weather-related deaths from 1970-2019 – from more than 60,000 to less than 15,000.

Whatever number you want to believe about annual fatalities caused by climate change (and there are many more to choose from), one thing is obvious: it’s well below 10.9 million.

So why have climate concerns so dramatically superseded those of food-based health? I don’t have any definitive answer, but I have a few theories.

One is that environmentalists have spent several decades agitating for action on climate change (or, as it was once more commonly known, “global warming”). Starting with Earth Day in 1970, continuing through Al Gore’s efforts, and beyond, there’s been a constant drumbeat about the need for action. And it’s had an impact. Virtually all companies of any size need to at least include a nod to their commitment to environmental protection. (How many of these commitments are genuine and how many are just a form of virtue signaling or “greenwashing” is a subject for another day.)

While the pace of change in public policy has disappointed many advocates, climate issues are nonetheless featured prominently on the national and international agenda (thus the Glasgow summit). News reports of “the hottest year on record” that seem to come every year add to the sense of urgency, as does the threat of causing irreparable harm to the planet. (A few years ago, the Obama Foundation labeled the Paris climate agreement as “the best possible shot to save the one planet we’ve got.”)

But amid the apocalyptic scenarios, let’s acknowledge, as this news service does, that “there has been progress made in flattening the curve of future emissions through both climate policies and falling clean energy costs.”

My other theory is that advocacy on diet is simply more difficult than climate advocacy. Start with the fact that food shortages have plagued humanity for centuries and until fairly recently advocacy efforts were more focused on delivering any food that would help stave off starvation – and not worrying about that food’s nutritional profile. (No longer: more children are projected to face obesity than being underweight.)

Second, there’s a reluctance among advocates to counsel people what to eat – as I’ve written about with regard to U.S. food stamps – for fear of seeming judgmental. Third, there’s the influence of the food and beverage conglomerates, which have little or no interest in the health of their customers.

There’s another possibility, which is purely speculative: So much time, energy, and money is devoted to environmental advocacy (very broadly defined) that concerns about dietary health get minimized.

I would love to see someone try to identify time/energy/money gap between the two causes. There’s no precise way to measure this, so it would be something of a fool’s errand. But a first-person example could suffice. Consider the sheer volume of articles that appear in the mainstream media about climate change, or corporate commitments to reducing their carbon footprint, or asset managers like BlackRock touting their sustainable investing profile.

Now compare that to how often you see the equivalent of each one of these for dietary health. For example, have you ever seen a leading financial firm pledge not to invest in the companies that make and sell ultra-processed food? Or have you seen scientists call on PR firms not to represent such companies (as they have done with fossil fuel clients)?

For the sake of argument, let’s postulate that the commitment gap between environmental advocacy and food-based health advocacy is 10-1 (I suspect it’s much larger). Does climate change merit 10 times more attention than issues around diet and health? That’s a challenge to the media, corporations, non-profits, and the entire philanthropic community.

There are, of course, areas where environmental concerns and food concerns overlap, such as the carbon footprint of the animal agriculture industry, which in the United States accounts for about 27 percent of all methane emissions. But environmentalists have traditionally been much more focused on targeting the energy industry than animal agriculture, even though the methane emission levels from the two sectors are almost the same (petroleum and natural gas account for 30 percent of U.S. methane emissions).

The latest evidence? Here’s a Wall Street Journal news story published on Saturday:

"The Biden administration is taking aggressive steps to curb the energy industry’s methane emissions, tightening pipeline regulations and spending billions of dollars to clean up abandoned coal mines and other sources of the potent greenhouse gas. Agriculture, just as big a source of methane, isn’t getting the same tough treatment."

The article goes on to quote a program director at Yale Law School saying the Biden administration is “giving a free pass to agriculture.” This posture is even more striking given that oil and gas emissions have declined 17 percent since 1990, while animal sources of emissions have increased 19 percent during the same period.

The Biden administration is simply continuing a disparate focus that has persisted for decades, throughout the world. Reversing this pattern is going to be extremely difficult amid the influence of what Ted Nordhaus, an environmental writer and analyst, labels “the climate-industrial complex.” But given what’s at stake, it’s certainly worth trying.