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
But getting food in the electronic health record, the number one cause of health is in tracts. in the electronic health record. That tells you everything, right?
About our health care system.
Yeah, fruit and vegetable prescriptions, medical education, medically tailored meals, changing quality guidelines, changing reimbursement guidelines. There's a lot to do in health care reform. Research and innovation is crucial.
Well, so yeah, you're describing medically tailored meals. And what you say is really crucial. About 5% of the population costs about 50% of health care costs. All the patients with really complex chronic diseases, kidney disease, cancer, heart failure, AIDS, a range of really severe diseases.
And several interventional studies now have shown that if you actually give those people food, give them three meals a day, which costs about $20 a day, it's much, much cheaper. You save money because they don't go to the hospital, they don't get admitted, they don't go to the emergency room. Because of that, things are changing so quickly, Mark.
Because of that, California has just launched a $6 million pilot to do medically tailored meals in eight counties in California this year. And if it works and they see the same results, they're going to extend it to all of California. So change is coming. Change is a coming. Change is a coming. Yeah. And so, you know, healthcare is a fourth bucket.
Another, a fifth bucket, which I think is crucial for policy is research and innovation. There's a lot we know, but there's so much left to learn. There's so much left to learn about how foods affect our brains, our microbiomes, the differences between different processing methods that we've talked about. I mean, we could go on and on and on.
Yeah, the numbers are really telling. The federal government itself estimated that all of its nutrition research is about $1.5 billion a year. And that sounds like a lot, but again, all of the country's drug industry research, pharmaceutical research is about $60 billion a year. Advertising on candy in the U.S. is about $5 billion a year compared to $1.5 billion on nutrition research.
So advertising on candy is $5 billion a year, and just purchasing of candy is $50 billion a year in the U.S. And so that $1.5 billion is just nothing compared to what the true issue is going on.
I have not seen that, but that really would be sad if that were true. Amazing. Yeah. So we really need research and innovation. I think we need a new National Institute of Nutrition at the NIH. The NIH has a National Cancer Institute, a National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. All these institutes focus on diseases. We need a National Institute of Nutrition.
It's the National Institute of Health. Food is the biggest challenge to health. Let's create a new National Institute of Nutrition. And again, that sounds impossible, but the National Cancer Institute was added recently. to NIH not that long ago because of just the concerted acts of a few people going to Congress and saying, hey, we need a war on cancer. We need a war on
on bad food and a victory for healthy food. We need a National Institute of Nutrition. We need public-private partnerships and guardrails so industry can fund nutrition research. I think industry has a role to fund nutrition research, but we really have to figure out how to do that transparently and carefully and independently.
It's, it's, it's a challenge. You know, again, the food industry is a heart healthy cereal with seven teaspoons of sugar. You know, that makes you want to quit the American Heart Association. It's challenging. It's challenging. I mean, I mean, the food industry has expertise that we need and they also have negative influence that we don't need.
And so how can we use the expertise and, and minimize the negative. So, And then I think the last area, you know, and have transparency around food in general. And I think the last policy area, we talked about economic incentives, schools, work sites, research and innovation, the healthcare system. The last area is sort of quality standards. There are some basic things.
The same way we have quality standards for toys or for cars or for houses. We need some minimum quality standards. And the easiest places to start are additives. So we need quality standards. Basically, the government's saying you shouldn't have too much of these things in food. It's just a minimum standard. We already have done that for trans fat. That's a huge win for the U.S.
We need to do that for salt and for added sugar additives. And then we need marketing restrictions on marketing of unhealthy foods to young kids.
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