Who’s Concerned about Your Health

Over the course of the last decade of being in the regenerative food movement, we’ve had numerous conversations with people about the effects and consequences food has in our lives. I think most of us agree it plays a significant part in our wellbeing. Although helping people find solutions to healthy and regenerative food is our most important and rewarding responsibility, the question bears asking, “Who is concerned about your health?”

I am a little surprised and disturbed by the occasional person I run into who seems to think their doctor, the FDA, their medical insurance, or perhaps pharmaceutical companies have their health in their best interest. Yes, they may be interested in your health decisions—even spending millions of dollars every year to influence those decisions, but I hardly think they’re very concerned about keeping you healthy. Rather, your health—or the lack thereof—spells PROFIT for them!

Your Doctor isn’t overly concerned about your health. I won’t say he doesn’t care about it—especially if he’s a private practice MD or an alternative practitioner. But doctor’s offices and hospitals are businesses and are in business to generate profit. That doesn’t make them evil or ill intended—they should be generously compensated for their knowledge and experience—but ultimately, they are a for-profit enterprise, and your health is secondary to that cause.

The FDA certainly isn’t concerned about your health. Initially set up as a gatekeeper to keep food and pharma manufacturers in their place, it’s a sad state of affairs that it has evolved to where it’s a vaccine and drug patent holder and essentially kidnapped by the industries it was intended to restrain. The same is true of the USDA, which oversees meat safety. My view is that these regulatory agencies are largely captured by the lobbying dollars of the very industries and interests they were set to oversee.

Your medical insurance isn’t concerned about health either. As you know, many insurance providers hem and haw about every little claim, and if they can manage a way to pass the buck on some other party or even back to you, they will. I’m not saying there’s no benefit to having health insurance, only that your medical insurance provider does not have your health in its best interest.

Farmers are not overly concerned about your health. It’s a common misconception to think that farmers (aside from Pasture to Fork, of course 😊) farm for the purpose of keeping you healthy. It’s just not true. Farmers, sadly enough, are largely in the commodity business, which is vastly influenced by agricultural academia and the commodity markets. As a rule, they are not overly concerned about what substances or practices are used on their crops or animals, due to the vast disconnect between the crop or animal they’re raising and the person who will eat it. This, to me, is a travesty, but a truth nevertheless. It’s a profit driven motive that unfortunately, allows for a lot of extremely unhealthy substances and practices to be used, even in “organic” farming, now. The first requirement, in my mind, that indicates a farmer’s concern for consumer health, is concern for how he treats the soil and the animals in his care, but that’s another discussion for another day.

Food manufacturers do not care about your health. While I hesitate to question motive and try to avoid thinking that individual persons are deliberately trying to harm innocent consumers, we must recognize that the world of food processing and manufacturing is highly competitive. Therefore, it is riddled with shortcuts, cheap fillers, marginal ingredients, sleazy regulation, and labeling tricks. Food manufacturers, corporately speaking, have not the slightest care about your health. Your dollars, yes, but not your health.  

Most of your health decisions, as a regular person, are made (or not made, if we live unconsciously) by you. This is true for those who take responsibility for their own health, and for those who don’t give personal health a second thought. Our daily decisions about what we eat, how we manage our lives (lifestyle choices), and what we wear (including body care products), impact our health. While we can try to delegate responsibility for our health to anyone from doctors to regulatory agencies to food manufacturers, those folks do not make our daily choices, which I argue influence our wellbeing far more than anything we can outsource to the entities I just mentioned. I don’t think we need to get all fanatical about health—which can easily become a stress factor in and of itself, but I do advocate for making daily conscious decisions for the good of our bodies—and even more the bodies of our children. We’re only given one body for which to care for and only one generation that immediately succeeds us, and I believe it’s worth our while to give it our best care.