![]() And it will also help overall with public health. And then to the point you made about food labeling - we have seen from other countries that are doing it, that do front-of-package labeling with critical information for consumers, that consumers will make better choices. The first thing is getting behind a movement that's been growing for years, which is a food as medicine movement, that people can literally get in their Medicare, Medicaid prescriptions for healthy fruits and vegetables, which actually will not only improve public health, but the evidence shows it will drive down our health care costs as well. So the White House, to their credit, has already come out with a vision to address some of these things. And as a result of that, that then drives taxpayer expenses again because of this incredibly high health care costs. They have a proliferation of tax-subsidized foods, but no access to healthy, fresh, affordable foods. And that's one of the reasons why you see in America places that are food deserts. And only 2% of our ag subsidies go to the healthy, fresh foods that our nutritionists tells us we should have as the majority of our diet. We are a nation that dramatically subsidizes the foods that are making us sick. So what are those concerns when it comes to that?īOOKER: Well, first, let me tell you the underlying concern of this all, which most Americans don't realize. And your concerns are based a lot on packaging labels. So when it comes to nutrition, I know you've raised concerns about what you just mentioned, ultra-processed foods. So my hope is that this is the beginning of another major movement in America to expand access to healthy, fresh foods, affordable foods, as well as making sure that we stop this over-proliferation of highly processed, sugar-filled, nutrition-empty foods that are really driving disease at alarming rates. But we have this explosion now of a nutrition crisis, with one out of every three of our government dollars being spent on health care because we have so many diet-related diseases out there from diabetes and heart disease, this explosion of obesity, that is really threatening public health in a way we have never seen before. There still is hunger and food insecurity. Booker talked with our co-host, A Martinez, and offered his vision for some outcomes.ĬORY BOOKER: The challenge we have now is we have a twin problem in our country. ![]() Democratic Senator Cory Booker was part of a bipartisan group behind the hunger conference.
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