"Buon cibo, buona salute." - "Good food, good health."
so why are there 2 different government departments?
All around the world, in numerous languages we find the same sentiment : good food equals good health
"Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es." (Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.)
Japanese: "食べることは医者いらず。" (Taberu koto wa isha irazu.) - "Eating good food is the best medicine."
Mandarin Chinese: "药补不如食补。" (Yào bǔ bù rú shí bǔ.) - "Food is better than medicine for nourishing the body."
Greek: "Η υγεία ξεκινάει από το πιάτο μας." (I ygeía xekináei apó to piáto mas.) - "Health starts from our plate."
Arabic: "الصحة بالطعام، وليس بالدواء." (Al-sihha bialtaaam, waleys bialdawaa.) - "Health is in the food, not in the medicine."
Around the world most countries have Departments or Ministries of Agriculture and Departments or Ministries of agriculture.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture oversees agriculture. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services oversees health policies.
In Germany, health is overseen by the Bundesministerium für Gesundheit.The Bundesministerium für Ernährung und Landwirtschaft oversees agriculture in Germany.
France has the Ministère des Solidarités et de la Santé responsible for health and social affairs. The Ministère de l'Agriculture et de l'Alimentation responsible for agricultural policies.
The expression ‘one hand doesn’t know what the other is doing’ has been used to describe governments for centuries. Indeed as a country becomes more ‘civilised’ they become increasingly complicated, laws beget laws, taxes, administration and the rest mean that governance becomes bloated, increasingly compartmentalised and secretive. As this seems well known how do we reconcile that good food leads to good health with the fact that two different, separate government departments put into place different and often opposing policies? To make matters worse they both are dominated by the government overlord of economic growth as measured by GDP.
GDP = C + I + G + NX where consumption (C) represents private-consumption expenditures by households and non-profit organizations, investment (I) refers to business expenditures by businesses and home purchases by households, government spending (G) denotes expenditures on goods and services by the government, and net exports (NX) represents a nation’s exports minus its imports.
Hospitals, pharmaceutical use, illness in general are counted as consumption/spending that increase a countries GDP. The global pharmaceutical industry directly contributed 532 billion U.S. dollars of gross value added to the world’s GDP in 2017 (source)
We consume vast quantities of pharmaceuticals because we are ill and this boosts GDP and we are ill because of the activities of other economic sectors that also boost GDP
The agricultural and food industry sectors make major contributions to GDP : Agriculture, food, and related industries contributed roughly $1.264 trillion to U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) in 2021’ (source)
Recent research from Northeastern University’s Network Science Institute the people behind https://www.truefood.tech/ indicates that 73 percent of the United States food supply is ultra-processed. We know that UPFs are very bad for our health. So our food industries are making us ill and this counts as a positive for GDP.
We know what we need to eat, wholefoods, fresh/ripe fruit and vegetables, a wide variety of nuts, fish and a bit of white meat if one must. Real food as opposed to what we could call dog-shit food (it contains nutrients but isn’t nutritive and will harm you if you eat it, basically the same as UTFs). Agriculture has to be reorientated and set on a course to produce the above sorts of food.
The whole thing has to be emancipated from the government departments and their fixation on GDP, taken out of the hands of the deluded thinkers who consider that the presence of certain molecules is what makes food healthy, safe and nutritive. We must reclaim our food and bring it back to our communities with sophisticated community integrated agricultural systems. A good diet when a foetus and then as a child means good resilient health throughout life and should lead on to a healthy and fit older age.
The recent NiPPeR double-blind randomized controlled trial revealed that nine out of 10 women trying to conceive had marginal or low levels of folate (normally found in food), riboflavin (normally found in food), vitamin B12 (normally found in food) or vitamin D (sunlight and some foods), while many showed signs of vitamin B6 deficiency in late pregnancy. These substances are all naturally found in food even vitamin D although we mainly produce this when exposed to the UVB found in sunlight. So how is it possible that an estimated 90% of women trying to conceive are so lacking in these easily available micro-nutrients? It would seem to tie into the huge quantities of ultra transformed foods that are being so widely consumed in which all the good stuff which should be in food has been replaced with a load of stuff which you shouldn’t put in your mouth. It would also seem that too many people are getting too little sunlight. What’s that all about?
As so often we are continually chasing after ourselves and trying to patch up what we have done, switch to electric cars, but they are heavy, so use more plastic which creates more toxic waste which means trying to find new technologies to depollute. In the same way fixation on GDP, separate and ineffective government departments and the food and health industries cause problems for which solutions then have to be found. A lack of vitamins in transformed foods leads to the promotion of food supplements and so-called ‘fortified foods’. All good for GDP and bad for us.
I could finish here with a salutation, maybe buona salute, or I could stand and do a military salute all three of which derive from salus "greeting, good health," related to salvus "safe" from PIE root sol- "whole, well-kept". But that could lead me onto another subject, the so-called wellness industry which is doing so much for GDP. Instead of spending a fortune on wellness products we would do ourselves a service if we went more towards ‘wholeness’ PIE root kailo- "whole, uninjured, of good omen" linked to hale and all wrapped up in the old expression ‘hale (whole) and hearty’ which means in a state of robust good health
