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By Matthew Rees

Food and Health Fact #191:

To promote public health, focus on tomatoes -- not Teslas

I post on Twitter semi-regularly. Find me at @foodhealthfacts The full catalog of my previous posts, articles, and commentaries can be found on the Food and Health Facts website

On Wednesday, the Biden Administration announced measures to “protect public health” – an announcement judged so important that the New York Times splashed it across the front page of its print edition.

Alas, the measures had nothing to do with the biggest public health challenge facing the United States: the standard American diet, also known as "SAD." The focus, instead, was vehicle pollution standards, which are a backdoor way to stimulate production of electric vehicles.Whatever one thinks of EVs, the U.S. Department of Energy projects they will only account for 19 percent of car sales even by 2050. As such, they are very low on the list of remedies for what ails Americans, whose life expectancy today is lower than at any point since 1996.

The administration’s announcement, coupled with its relative silence on the harmful effects of the American diet, is but the latest reminder of what I’ve written about previously: the way in which environmental issues receive infinitely more attention – from policymakers, the press, and advocacy groups – than food issues.

This is striking given that as recently as 2016, diet was tied to three of the four leading causes of death of Americans, according to an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association. But the apocalyptic scenarios that are a staple of environmental media coverage and policy talk would suggest that climate issues are the leading threat facing the United States.

There are complex reasons for the disparate treatment, but one explanation seems to be that the country has become numbed to the devastating effects of the American diet. Here’s Michael Greger, MD, from his book How Not to Die, commenting on this phenomenon:

Imagine if terrorists created a bioagent that spread mercilessly, claiming the lives of nearly four hundred thousand Americans every year. That is the equivalent of one person every eighty-three seconds, every hour, around the clock, year after year. The pandemic would be front-page news all day, every day. We’d marshal the army and march our finest medical minds into a room to figure out a cure for this bioterror plague. In short, we’d stop at nothing until the terrorists were stopped. Fortunately, we’re not actually losing hundreds of thousands of people each year to a preventable threat … are we?

Actually, we are. This particular biological weapon may not be a germ released by terrorists, but it kills more Americans every few years than have all our past wars combined. It can be stopped not in a laboratory but right in our grocery stores, kitchens, and dining rooms. As far as weapons go, we don’t need vaccines or antibiotics. A simple fork will do. So what’s going on here? If this epidemic is present on such a massive scale, yet so preventable, why aren’t we doing more about it? The killer I’m talking about is coronary heart disease, and it’s affecting nearly everyone raised on the standard American diet. 

Precisely what Washington could do – or should do – to address the diet epidemic is a subject for another time. But we know that public policy can have transformative effects. I was reminded of this a few days ago when reading the obituary of a public health official I’d never heard of: Colin McCord.

He served as assistant health commissioner of New York when Michael Bloomberg was mayor and he was a leading architect of the city’s ban on smoking in workplaces, restaurants, and bars. It was very controversial at the time. Today, it’s standard practice in the United States and throughout the world.

It’s also been one of the reasons smoking rates have continued to decline over the past two decades – part of a long-term move against tobacco that has been one of the greatest U.S. public health achievements over the past 75 years. He was also part of an effort, which I have written about previously, that succeeded in banning trans fats in New York and eventually led to their being prohibited by the Food and Drug Administration.

McCord was sufficiently low-profile that he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia profile. But his career is a reminder that one person, working in government, can drive a tremendous and immediate improvement in public health – if willing to think big about how to address burning health threats.

That’s a useful reminder at a time when policymakers are largely asleep at wheel when it comes to the nexus between diet and disease. Their focus should be much more on the remedial effects of products like tomatoes. And much less on Teslas.