The Truth About the Interconnectedness of the Food and Health Care

Last week, I keynoted a healthcare conference in Boston.

And with that, I had the opportunity to hear stats from an industry that has not spent a whole lot of time in dialogue with those who are part of the food revolution. And it was fascinating.

Before the opening address, a welcome was delivered by Amy Cueva, the Chair of the conference.

She began highlighting these facts:

• The United States spends more per capita on healthcare than any other nation in the world. But we?re ranked 37^th in performance.
• Two-thirds of all bankruptcies in the U.S. are related to healthcare costs.
• 34% of American adults are overweight. Another 34% are obese.
• And 1 in 3 Americans born after 2000 will contract early onset diabetes. Among minorities, the rate is 1 in 2.
• With these growing rates of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, the American diet has been in the spotlight more and more.
• And we?re realizing, it isn?t just about how much we eat. What we eat and the way it?s produced is actually making us sick.
  • Only 35% of Americans agreed strongly with the statement, ?I am confident in the safety of the food I eat.?
  • Although the Food Safety Modernization Act was signed in January of 2011, budget cuts and lobbying by interest groups threaten many of the provisions designed to keep our food safe and uncontaminated.
  • In July, 2011, the USDA identified over 6,000 food deserts in the U.S. A ?food desert? is defined as a place where people must travel more than 1 mile in urban communities and 10 miles in rural communities to access fresh fruits and vegetables.

She went on to say, ?The old adage ?you are what you eat? rings true. It?s crystal clear that what we eat, how we live, and how we feel affects our health.? But as we discussed, very few dialogue about how interconnected are food system and healthcare systems are.

Yet thankfully, there is a growing awareness and some amazing statistics that she highlighted that indicate remarkable change that has happened in the past year.

• A survey showed that 98% of physicians are using mobile devices in their work.
• The new 3^rd generation ipad includes a button that allows users to dictate. For physicians, this can mean significant time savings in recording patient notes and entering EMR data.
• The U.S. Surgeon General challenged developers to submit their health, wellness, and fitness mobile apps for review in its Healthy App challenge. They received 88 submissions.

As Amy said, ?This is all exciting work. We feel good about it. But, we want to take it further.?

And with a call to action, ?focused on human centricity, collaboration, the desire to explore different avenues, the knowledge that sometimes the simplest answer is the best answer, this thinking, which she called ?design thinking?, won?t just design excellent physical spaces, and interfaces, and communication strategies?, it could also help us address the greater issues we are seeing today about food insecurity, food waste and food technology.

The conference was inspiring on many levels.? We came together not as members of different industries that had not yet established a working dialogue, but as citizens sitting down together at our national dinner table together. ??We came together as a family.

And as attendees approached the stage one after the other, sharing their stories of their daughter with diabetes, the wife they?d lost to cancer, or their son?s autism, I was once again reminded of the fact that we are a national family, sitting down to our national dinner table, and that diseases like cancer, diabetes and autism, don?t know party lines, geographic location of socioeconomic status.? And that together, leveraging all of our collective talents, we can begin to restore the health of our families for the future of our country as seen in the short interview below:

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