Telling Americans to ‘eat better’ doesn’t work. We must make healthier food | Mark Bittman

For decades public health authorities have encouraged us to choose healthier foods - yet most choices available to Americans are bad ones

Diet-related chronic disease is the perennial number one killer in the United States, responsible for more deaths than Covid-19 even at the pandemic's peak. Yet we cannot manage to define this as a crisis". In fact, our response is lame: for decades we've been telling people to eat better", a strategy that hasn't worked, and never will.

It cannot, as long as the majority of calories we produce are unhealthy. It is the availability of and access to types of food that determines our diets, and those, in turn, are factors of agricultural policy. For a healthy population, we must mandate or at least incentivize growing real food for nutrition, not cheap meat and corn and soya beans for junk food.