Did you know you were subsidizing that?

Well this was an eye opener.  Please watch this 5 minute video above.

And this is much more than just an explanation of Government largess and its role in obesity.   It illustrates, to me, a fundamental flaw in this country's perverse economic incentives and anything-BUT-free-market capitalism.

Just imagine if instead of corporate lobbying and corporate profits as the levers of Government, we included things such overall health (not health system profits) of our population.  That would put primacy on the food that we were subsidizing to be health-promoting, which would mean a whole-food, plant-based diet.

Traditionally, this food is among the cheapest ... that's why it's often called peasant food.  Yet now we have tax payer subsidies -- your money -- going to pay for food that is actually causing the majority of our major causes of death!  Which of course, in a perverse way, is also a subsidy to our broken health care system.

This seems relatively straightforward to fix; we have precedences.  We basically need to flip the current model on its head.  We need to DIS-incentivise unhealthy eating (and therefore unhealthy food production).  We can do that the same way this country successfully took on the tobacco industry and the alcohol industry -- through increased taxes, not subsidies, through controls on advertising, and ultimately through health insurance pricing that recognizes diet as an explicit risk factor.

But there is even a larger framework here.  Our system, as it stands, values GDP and corporate profit over everything else.  What about flipping that model on its head as well.  Why not look for the levers that would instead promote citizen health, happiness, education, reduced income inequality, safety, diversity, civility, and equal justice.

Again, we know this can be done; there are many models in the industrialized world that promote most of these objectives.  This just requires Americans to wake up to what is really going on in our country.  And, for me, this video was a surprising wake-up call.

Here's to us making changes that help the current generation, and even more importantly, future generations of our citizens to prosper, in health, in happiness, and financial security.