The Struggle for Public Health
Book Rec.
Public health is something I know I take for granted. Some of us living in first world countries in the 2000s even call it a “right”.
Taking it for granted can be detrimental as the experiment called the United States of America is proving as it’s residents consume more ultra processed high fat foods than anywhere and are paying the price. Having choices and having a free market capitalist economy are great powers to us all individually - but what about the personal responsibility? (ie great powers, great responsibility, right, Spiderman?)
Is it possible that in all of this ‘regulating’, someone or something took away our sense of agency?
Someone forgot to tell us that because something is advertised to us all and passes through the FDA or USDA scrutiny, that it still may not be “good for us”. That we need to scrutinize foods and products and how it is created and presented ourselves. Each of our bodies have different ways of processing and digesting between our gut microbiota and our brain and that needs to be considered.
Whereas the FODMAP diet may be good for one, the KETO VEGAN diet may be good for another, and, in some cases, the good-old-fashioned-meat-and-potatoes diet might be good for yet another - or, in Texas, Birria, Breakfast, or Barbacoa Tacos. Best of all - How about a little of every kind of diet? Studies show that diversity in an individual’s diet is one of the keys to a healthy gut!
The choices can be confusing. Knowing yourself and how your body works is a starting place. And still you may find peer pressure to convert back to old ways. Sober people have been known to say that not drinking is more likely to be questioned than poisoning yourself into intoxication (aka drinking alcohol). Similarly, if you’ve ever watched Chicago Fire, they mock a certain diet that came out of, of all places, Texas because of its vegetarian nature (without naming names of course). It’s true, the Engine 2 Diet straight out of Austin, Texas became a national phenomenon, yet still people who were stuck in their ways refused to change or take control of their own health issues. Diabetes and obesity continue to weigh down our national health and is considered a crisis.
The public health system may be failing many of us, but there were days when there was no public health system at all.
Summary from Nature:
Fred C. Pampel John Hopkins Univ. Press(2024)
Rates of death from communicable diseases fell hugely in the late nineteenth century; by 49% for respiratory tuberculosis (TB), for example. But much of the fall had less to do with medical advances — the TB vaccine was not in widespread use until 1954 — than with “rising standards of living, better nutrition, and a strengthening public health movement”, writes sociologist Fred Pampel. His book explores this complexity clearly in seven chapters, each devoted to a public-health pioneer, from epidemiologist John Snow to nurse Lillian Wald.
