At some abstract level Obama sees that he’s not going to get his health care costs under control unless we change the way Americans eat. Because the crisis of rising costs in the American health care system can be translated very simply as the catastrophe of the American diet, which represents probably half of what we spend on health care in America. We spend about $2 trillion a year. The Centers for Disease Control says that 1.5 trillion goes to treat chronic disease. Now you’ve got smoking in there, alcoholism, but other than that, chronic disease is mostly food related. So you really can’t get control of that system unless you are preventing some of those chronic diseases.
Michael Pollan | AlterNet