https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/21/whole-foods-ceo-john-mackey-plant-based-meat-not-good-for-your-health.html
And a quote from the article:
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Mackey says most Americans wouldn’t enjoy eating like he does (he has 15 fruits and vegetables a day) because their taste buds are used to a diet that includes a lot of processed foods.
“So the reason why these plant-based meats have taken the world by storm is that they taste very similar to regular meats, whereas if you get a [healthy] black bean burger with flax seeds and sweet potatoes in it, that’s going to taste great to me,” he says, but not to most people.
Mackey says the good news is that people can retrain their palate to “enjoy pretty much anything” by consistently eating something they typically didn’t like before.
“I love fruits and vegetables,” Mackey says, because he trained his taste buds to love them.
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So let's say a person retrains their palate to love fruits and vegetables. They are also going to notice they don't feel the many physical discomforts of eating bad foods (antacids are the best selling over the counter medication). They will notice they can eat fruits and vegetables till they are coming out of their ears and they will still drop to a healthy BMI. They will notice good nutrition + healthy BMI = a lot more energy, and they will want to move their bodies, and they will enjoy it.
How many conclusive studies, for how many years, did it take before the Surgeon General put warning labels on cigarettes? More than 7000 studies over three decades. Governments are short sighted, they prefer industrial sources of revenue to public health.
Now, compare how much revenue was generated by the tobacco industry to how much is being generated by all the industries profiting in some way from all the various diseases directly caused by bad diet. I don't have a stat for that but my guess is at least 20x the revenue, adjusted for inflation, is being generated by bad food in many various ways.
The government will tell us (finally) that tobacco is bad for us. They will tell us that alcohol and drugs are bad for us. But they won't tell us bad food is the bigger problem. Will it take 20x as many studies and 20x as much time for gov to begin telling us a processed food animal based diet is bad for us?
Don't count on government or industry to reverse behaviors that are generating hundreds of billions of dollars annual revenue. Do count on those sources of revenue to be protected by dozens of industries and many thousands of influential individuals. Count on those sources of revenue to be protected by bad science, and count on seeing those conclusions on the front pages of mass media. (Bad science is essentially that which is generated by profit motive, with studies designed to produce a certain result.)
Count on never having heard of the many thousands of good science studies going back decades. If you start looking into it count on being surprised the good science outweighs the bad by multiples of 100.
Don't count on gov to promote truly healthy diets. The change will be a grassroots effort driven by individuals from all walks of life that have begun to see the big picture and want health for themselves and their loved ones.
On a related note, there is an interesting movie coming out soon titled "The Game Changers".
Interview of the director at Sundance this year:
And the web site for the movie:
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