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
I would have to go and look at that history. I don't know that history. I know about Earl Butts and his kind of green revolution, but the farm bill and kind of the subsidy approach has been oversimplified. There's actually a lot of things in the newer farm bills to promote specialty crops that are called specialty crops like fruits and vegetables to start to promote them.
A better approach would be to go to the retail level, right? A better approach would be to go directly to the consumer. And I think we should do that because right now the price we pay for foods doesn't reflect the true societal cost of the food and healthcare and lost productivity and suffering. All the externalities.
Absolutely. And so it's really not a punitive or approach or a favoritism approach. It's just bringing true market prices to food, right? Food should reflect the true market cost and benefit to people.
If we taxed most foods, most packaged and processed foods with a flat tax, 10%, 20%, 30%, whatever we could do, and then we used all of that money, crucially, we used all of that money to heavily subsidize at the retail level.
at the consumer purchase level or at the farm cost level, if you invest in farmer training, new equipment, other things, then you would use all that money to invest in and reduce the price of minimally processed healthy foods like fruits and vegetables and nuts and seeds and plant oils and fish and yogurt and things like that.
You would turn the prices upside down or at least more normal, where you couldn't buy
yeah 36 ounce soda for 99 cents anymore and you wouldn't have to pay 50 cents or 70 cents for an apple you'd pay 25 cents 20 cents for an apple you'd pay a dollar for a serving of salmon right you'd pay a dollar 30 for soda instead yeah that would change all the incentives for farmers for retailers for restaurants for manufacturers and for the consumer and so you know what's happened over the last 40 years is the price of
Well, fruits and vegetables in season are still quite affordable. The USDA did a nice analysis of that. So fruits and vegetables in season are quite affordable, but there's a lot of fruits and vegetables out of season now, and those, of course, are really expensive because they're getting shipped around the world. So that's another challenge. But
But I think that price is clearly one tool that the government needs to use to help address healthier food. And it sounds sort of pie in the sky, like this will never happen, but there's now at least a dozen countries around the world that have passed soda taxes.
Yeah. Unfortunately, none of that money is being used, to my knowledge, for subsidizing healthy foods. And so that makes the taxes only regressive in terms of finances for the poor. Although it's progressive for health for the poor, it's progressive for finances. We should use the revenue from those taxes to create incentives and systems for making healthy food less expensive.
while helping farmers, right? We don't want to just make the food less expensive by putting farmers out of business. So I think that price is just an absolutely crucial tool. And we've learned from Tobacco, for example, how important price is.
Yeah, well, there's a lot of challenges in North Korea for sure that maybe food wouldn't be the first thing I'd address, but it would be up there. So I think that there's probably... six or seven categories of policies that I think are really crucial. One is fiscal economic incentives.
So like we talked about, direct-to-consumer incentives or taxes, industry incentives, fiscal incentives, give them incentives for marketing and advertising and developing of healthy foods, and give them disincentives for the opposite.
Yeah, that's actually been proposed in Congress. It hasn't, you know, gained steam or gotten out of committee, but it's proposed to take away the tax breaks that companies now get for marketing junk food, right? Fiscal incentives through SNAP, the food stamps program. Fiscal incentives is one category.
You know, two other categories are crucial is to change the environments in schools and work sites. They're Kids spend much of their day in schools. Adults spend much of their day at work sites.
There's a lot of ways, wellness programming, environmental standards, procurement policies to make schools and work sites, places where you, and hospitals, you know, places where you can only really get healthy food, food that tastes good and is healthy and is good.
Well, the 2010 Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act was actually a pretty enormous advance. And so school lunch is much, much better than it was before that. There are still holes, but it's actually probably one of the best policies, food policies we have nationally is the school lunch policy.
Well, soda's not allowed in public schools anymore.
No, no. Soda's not allowed in schools, including sports drinks. Competitive foods, there's smart snack standards, and they're pretty much out of public schools.
Juices? 100% juice is okay, but sugar-sweetened beverages are out of schools with healthy, hungry kids. Pretty landmark, actually. There are, again, some holes, but it's pretty landmark. But more can be done. I agree. So I think schools, work sites, fiscal incentives, those are three categories. Healthcare reform. There's a lot to do in healthcare. And that's a whole other podcast.
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