Step One: The case for mass public education campaigns
“We are seeing this pandemic because it's been fueled by a slower pandemic of chronic illness that makes people at high risk, and we have not had the emphasis on disease prevention in our society that we all need and deserve.” -Dr Howard Koh on Yahoo Finance, July 5, 2020
As we now know, embedded structural inequities like redlining, underfunding of public schools, public sector/frontline employment, inability to afford healthy food, food swamps and the built environment, have contributed to disproportionate Covid-19 rates of infection, complications, and death among much of the country’s minority populations. But it’s important also to realize that, regardless of race or ethnicity, much of the destruction that SARS CoV-2 leaves behind clearly reveals the effects of diets high in processed food. As addictive as nicotine and heroin, processed food is a huge driver of hypertension, obesity, and diabetes – comorbidities one, two and three in Covid-19.
I am a clinic nurse, and I say this as someone who has dedicated hundreds of hours to education: It is not your fault or my fault or our fault that we have the current burden of chronic disease that we do, and it’s not our fault that processed food caused it, but though we as healthcare workers are nominally part of the solution, at times it seems like we are asked to be the entire solution.
A system whereby you ask doctors and nurses to one by one by one educate thousands of food-addicted, undernourished people could not be more inefficiently designed.
It is beyond time to seek ways to launch massive public education campaigns, definitively linking diets high in ultra-processed food directly to poor health outcomes.
Diet has been the kindling that has allowed this pandemic to blaze through. If all public health agencies and companies do is fall back on the assumption that stress and poverty lead to a poor diet, and leave it to a few doctors and nurses to talk to a handful of residents, the ramifications of a poor diet are not addressed at a mass level, and we have no hope of slowing the rate of severe chronic disease. I believe that people, even people under stress, presented with information vital to their health in a way that grabs their attention can (and have been shown to) adjust, to both make and demand better food choices.
Such a campaign is not meant to be unsympathetic to those forced to sustain themselves on unhealthy food, but rather a tool in the larger struggle for health equality.
And it is only step one in better health equity – making the case. While it does not preclude weaving in other strategies, illustrating the link between processed food consumption and chronic disease is fundamental to firmly situating health as a key driver and indicator of equality.
