Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian
speaker
96 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 25 May
Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
And I think in terms of bipartisanship, how do you crack that nut? There was an important commission on evidence-based policymaking that Senator Patty Murray and former Speaker Paul Ryan actually led a couple of years ago and talked about sort of an evidence, the importance of evidence-based policymaking in that same vein.
there ought to be bipartisanship around what are those priorities in the prevention and public health space that we actually need to invest more in. Right.
That's right. That's right. And that leads me to sort of the fifth point, which is we need, Dr. Hyman, more research. I mean, we have evidence-based right now, but we need more research into prevention. Now, the National Institutes on Health estimates that 19% of their budget every year goes to prevention. Now, one could ask, is that the right number or not? I don't know.
Now, there was another study that I recently saw that if you look at the National Cancer Institute, only 5% of their budget goes to prevention. So whatever the number is, I think that these are all sort of low.
Right, right, right. And so I would argue, and I argue in the book, that there ought to be a much more... focused research emphasis on prevention that looks at not just sort of the biology of illnesses, but also the importance of behavioral change, as well as policy, as well as other areas. And that will also actually help the Congressional Budget Office
Irrespective of what happens with the 10-year budget window, the more research, the more evidence there will help policymakers. So I think in all five of these areas, number one, leadership prioritizing prevention. Number two, healthcare professionals focusing on prevention, not just management.
Number three, a parallel pathway for lifestyle interventions and evidence-based community prevention interventions. Number four, public health resources. And number five, prevention research. All of these
They're all heavy lifts, Dr. Hyman, but I think that I wouldn't be writing a book if these weren't heavy lifts, but these are absolutely important for policymakers on both sides of the aisle to understand the importance of these. And I think if there's movement on the policy side, the American public will
We'll see this also as a way to support themselves as they try to make sort of the healthy choice. But the American public is clamoring for assistance. Behavioral change is difficult given the environment, which you have so beautifully described. And I think the best way to counter that environment is through policy change and empowered Americans speaking out.
Well, I think it's all the above also having pathways. Again, as you said, there's no real pathway. Medicare, Medicaid don't really know what to do with a lot of these interventions that are not sort of the traditional sort of medical model. As you know, in 1965, when Medicare was first created, it was essentially paid for the treatment of disease using routine medical services.
So it hasn't really caught up with today's day and age and what we know about the importance of lifestyle medicine either. with prevention or treatment. So I think some of this is research. Some of this are new pathways in the government, regulatory pathways. Some of this is educating the public.
It's really going to take, I think, all of the above to sort of change the status quo, because there are a lot of opportunities out there that are not being realized.
Yeah, I just want to highlight and repeat what you said. You know, one in five dollars in the entire U.S. economy is spent on health care. One in four dollars in the entire federal budget is spent on Medicare and Medicaid.
This is swallowing the economics of our country. It's swallowing our government budgets. It's swallowing competitiveness of business. It's pretty shocking if you think about, you know, food, how big of a part of our lives it is, how big of a part of the economy it is.
I can't think of any other part of our economy, any other products that we interact with every day where safety is left up to the consumer. Imagine if you went to toy stores. I love this analogy. Just imagine you went to toy stores and everybody knew there was lots of toys that were unsafe for the kids. There were lots of toys that were okay, a little bit unsafe, but not fully safe.
And there were some toys that were really safe. Or you walked into a building and, or you went to buy a house and some houses met earthquake standards and fire standards and electrical standards and plumbing standards. Others didn't at all, not even close. And some houses were kind of in between some things were met or other things were not met or teachers in school.
Some teachers, you know, were, were safe, you know, and were good for the teachers and others were known. Everyone knew the teachers were dangerous for the, for the children in different, different ways. Yeah. we would never leave it up to the individual family or the individual person to deal with that mess, right? We would say, this is outrageous, right?
We want safe toys, safe cars, safe homes, some minimum standards, right? And yet in food, it's the only system where we sort of say, well, it's up to the individual person. We need education. We need labeling. We need dietary guidelines. We just need to leave it up to the person and just not do anything else. And I think, again, that's
That's, to me, kind of the craziest thing about our policy approach so far is that it's all up to the individual consumer. And so, of course, we need to keep choice, and there's a range of foods that people should be able to choose from, but all of them should be reasonably safe.
Well, yeah, I get asked about my thoughts on the role of the food industry a lot. And it's like everything else. It's complicated. It's not straightforward. So first, I have to say that the food industry has followed and continues to follow a lot of the really harmful and
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