Food Fix: How to Save Our Health, Our Economy, Our Communities and Our Planet – One Bite at a Time

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And the most depressing part is where Hyman explains how structural the corruption is, with nutritionists being paid off (essentially), Congress being paid off, the FDA completely biased with individuals coming from the companies that it is supposed to police, etc. He claims that change is needed at that structural level, such as congressmen and women rejecting or ignoring the vast sums of campaign contributions and lobbying from companies like Coca-Cola and actually revamping the Farm Bill to encourage farmers to actually grow real food for people instead of subsidizing them to grow cheap corn and soybean oil for junk food and cattle. Who really counts on Congress to do ANYTHING these days, much less something so huge and fraught with very rich and partisan special interests? Depressing. Avoid sugar (especially added sugars), pesticides, hormones, GMO's and bad oils like corn, canola, and soybean There is one place that nearly everything that matters in the world today converges: our food and our food system—the complex web of how we grow food, how we produce, distribute, and promote it; what we eat, what we waste, and the policies that perpetuate unimaginable suffering and destruction across the globe that deplete our human, social, economic, and natural capital.

The bit about the soils going dead got my attention, but forecasting anything 60 years from now is next to impossible. The author also covers global warming and modern agriculture's huge contributions to climate change and carbon levels. The first chapter, The True Cost of Food, is an eye opener that goes over many of the unintended consequences of our modern agricultural system. This is a long, fact-laden book, but I will try to summarize the main points below. In Food Fix, #1 bestselling author Mark Hyman explains how our food and agriculture policies are corrupted by money and lobbies that drive our biggest global crises: the spread of obesity and food-related chronic disease, climate change, poverty, violence, educational achievement gaps, and more.

And then finally there is climate change. Agriculture creates more carbon emissions than all of transportation according to this book. Carbon is released from the soils when it is tilled. Methane comes from cattle and landfills full of food waste. And Nitrogen dioxide comes from fertilizers that are used to boost crops. Getting a handle on global warming will also require dealing with the huge agriculture industry. Handling fossil fuels is just a part of it.

Hyman does a great job giving equal focus to the economic, human health, and planetary health issues associated with our current food industry. Everything he presents is evidence-based, and he evaluates where the funding and motivation for studies comes from. The book does not just spell out all of the problems - many solutions are proposed as well. My only complaint was it got very repetitive. Here are some things that stood out to me:Food Fix is a manifesto against America's current food system. Dr. Mark Hyman has written several books on nutrition and a leader in the field of integrative medicine, an up-and-coming field that focuses on the whole patient and their environment. At current usage levels we have maybe 60 years of good crops left before the soils around the world go dead.