And in this context I want to feature a conversation between Dr Mark Hyman and Pam Koch, EdD, RD. who teaches both Nutritional Ecology and Community Nutrition to master and doctoral students at Columbia University.
Why is it minorities have the highest rates of obesity and "modern" (post industrial) diseases? Many of their neighborhoods have even been dubbed "nutrition deserts". And native Americans living on reservations have it even worse. Dr Hyman went so far as to say "it's almost a second genocide of native Americans".
At minimum it's an "accidental genocide" because the critical importance of a whole food plant based diet for health was not fully understood at that point. As this critical importance becomes more and more obvious, we still have a long way to go, but we are doing better.
A big part of why we're not there yet is Docs still don't tell patients whole plant foods work better than drugs, and oh by the way "food as medicine" is free (you gotta buy food anyway). But even if they did, what then? Changing from a diet based on animals to a diet based on plants is an "intervention level situation" for most people. At minimum it's an education in how delicious and satisfying it can be, and how to prepare it. But one may also want to know a little bit about how and why it works.
Here's Mark Hyman and Pam Koch in a discussion titled "Why What You Eat Matters".
Yeah, you can see how food policy can contribute to the collapse of a civilization as a long term process from the inside. Racism from a policy of neglect would be part of that process.
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