Dr. Anand Parekh
speaker
112 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Dr. Anand Parekh’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Or I was speaking to the former head of population health at Cleveland Clinic where I work, and he said, you know, if we provided housing and food for young mothers, we would dramatically reduce preterm births and neonatal costs, which are literally in the billions and billions of dollars.
And yet our health care system isn't set up to provide food or housing or any of the things that actually make the most difference. That's what's so striking to me.
Yeah, it's true. We were at a friend's house, Jimmy Haslam, and his brother was the governor of Tennessee, and we were chatting, and he said, you know, a third of our Tennessee budget is Medicaid. which is not only because of populations who are affected by these social determinants and desperate to find solutions, but I don't think they're hearing the right ideas.
I don't think they're hearing the right information. And I think, you know, the fact that, you know, you're out there talking about this and that, there's these models like national health, I think hopefully will spur governors and mayors and others to actually start to act on this because this is where we have to move.
I think, you know, in healthcare right now, there's this movement towards population health. Cleveland Clinic just stood up a new program called 4C, Cleveland Clinic Community Care, to try to actually act in this space. And they started a food is medicine program. So you see these global leaders like Cleveland Clinic leaning into this space to
But I still find it's so incremental and I am like, wait, you know, this is like, I feel like I'm, I've got a big, you know, a truck full of water and I'm, you know, in the desert and there's on the other side of this glass wall is everybody's dying of thirst. And it's like, it's so not that hard. Yeah. And yet, and we're just, it's so frustrating. So I think you're right.
I think it's a grassroots efforts and, and on the local, local levels being, being focused on this. And it's also educating policymakers. And that's really why, you know, I, I wrote my book food fix is why I started the, the food fix campaign, try to create a coordinated effort.
Like you're talking about for the 2000 people in Washington that actually need to be educated to understand these things, because, you know, I don't believe there's anybody that wakes up in the morning and says, you know, I just want to keep people sick in America and I want to maintain the status quo.
I mean, people, whether you're a big CEO of a food company or you're a politician, everybody wants better for themselves, for their families, for their country. It's just that we don't have the roadmap to get there. And I think this is the kind of stuff that actually has to be at the forefront of whoever is in the next administration in the aftermath of COVID-19.
Because just in terms of pandemic preparedness, how do we deal even... the next pandemic that's going to come unless we make a more resilient healthcare system, a more resilient population. And I think, you know, I think you've worked so hard to do that.
So how would you, if you were president today, what would you be like leading the charge on to get us going in the right direction around this incredible burden of health disparities and chronic disease and social determinants?
I'm a Democrat, but I would vote for you.
Why aren't the good people running? I just don't understand.
You're one of the few scientists, physicians who've come to the insight that we can't just treat patients in the office and tell them what to eat, that we have to fix the food environment that healthcare fix.
It's not just about better care coordination or better efficiencies or improving payment systems or prevention in some vague way, but it has to do with changing the context in which we eat the foods that we have access to and the policies that promote the consumption of more and more of the bad stuff. And again, we're sort of incentivizing the wrong things.
So one, how did you kind of have the aha? And two, let's talk about this because it seems like, you know, one, one in $5 is for healthcare and about 80% of that is for chronic disease. And most of that is from diet that if we go upstream, unless you go upstream, we're not going to fix the problem.
And that's projected to go up exponentially.
Yeah. All of them. Well, the challenge with that is that the food industry has polluted the science with studies that confound the truth, that challenge notions that they're unsafe. You know, American Beverage Association fund studies that soda doesn't cause obesity and kind of muddies the waters.
And so the argument is, well, who's going to be the judge and determine whether or not this is safe or not safe, right? Some people think, well, Twinkie's fine if you eat it once a week, but maybe not. Yeah.
There was a guy who was at the Milken Conference who was the head of a big food company. He was like, I feel like a frightened dinosaur.
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