Taking a more holistic view on personal and planetary health (interview with physician and research scientist dr. Daphne miller)
Dr. Daphne Miller (@daphnemillermd) is a family physician, science writer, research scientist, author, and Clinical Professor at the University of California San Francisco. She is also the author of Jungle Effect and the founder of the Health from the Soil Up Initiative, where she studies the connections among health, culture, and agriculture, with the goal of building a healthier and more resilient food system from the soil up.
In this podcast episode, Daphne sheds light on why we need to dismantle the idea that spending more on health equals better health outcomes; the primary causes leading the nutrition levels within our whole foods to have decreased over the decades; and more.
To start, get a glimpse below into the conversation between Daphne and Green Dreamer Podcast's host, Kamea Chayne.
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Mountain Twin by Joel Porter (@JoelPorterMusic)
“The US spends more per capita than pretty much every other industrialized nation [on healthcare] and gets far fewer healthy years in return.”
If you feel inspired by this episode, please consider donating a gift of support of any amount today!
This is a conversation on Green Dreamer with Kamea Chayne, a podcast and multimedia journal illuminating our paths towards ecological balance, intersectional sustainability, and true abundance and wellness for all. This preview has been edited for clarity. Subscribe to Green Dreamer Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or any podcast app to stay informed and updated on our latest episodes.
On the need to dismantle the assumption that spending more on health leads to better health outcomes:
"In the U.S., you can just follow the dollars and we have this belief that if we spend enough on research and technology and enough on our healthcare system, somehow we can get healthier as a nation. We spend more per capita than pretty much every other industrialized nation and get far fewer healthy years in return.
In my mind, it's just a complete misappropriation of funds. We really need to go way upstream and change the environments where we live and the environments where we grow our food and we need to protect our natural environments.
That's really how you protect health, ensure longevity, and wellbeing and quality of life. Trying to spend it on technologies or ‘miraculous’ CRISPR interventions is an idea that certainly can benefit us a small proportion of the population, but not most people.”
On how our agriculture and healthcare systems are connected:
"Our industrialized healthcare system and our industrialized agriculture system together have really conspired to keep us sick — it's very evident to me.
It's a profitable business for both of them and interestingly, they're often the same companies, like Bayer and Syngenta. They produce chemicals for agriculture and chemicals for our bodies.
The system as it stands right now is really working quite well for them and for insurers as well, as long as they are not on the hook for insuring us for a whole lifetime, the system also works well.
But I think that's going to shift for insurers if they were responsible for us from, from cradle to grave, because then all of a sudden this sick care system becomes very, very expensive for them.”
On the most effective drivers of change to improve our food system:
"The real lever lies within anchor institutions that play an important role in communities, either rural or urban. So hospitals, schools, universities, nursing homes, large employers, and other places that are bulk buying.
I spoke at Stanford the other day and they told me there they serve 12,000 meals a day just on campus and that doesn't even include the hospitals.
These kinds of organizations have an enormous amount of power in terms of their buying potential and they're able to funnel those resources in terms of foods and money into a community.
So they're really the ones that we should be lobbying and expecting to step up to the plate. They have much more power than the individual consumer.”
Final words of wisdom:
"Continue to dream. We need a lot of green dreamers out there!”
