Prevention as a forgotten discipline
Why we spend billions on repair and virtually nothing on prevention.
Prevention as a forgotten discipline
Why we spend billions on repair and virtually nothing on prevention.
T. Colin Campbell documented in The China Study the largest epidemiological investigation into the relationship between nutrition and disease ever conducted. His conclusion was uncomfortable for the Western medical industry: most chronic diseases, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, certain forms of cancer, are largely preventable by adjusting dietary patterns. Not through supplements, not through medication, but through what you eat.
Michael Marmot reveals in The Health Gap a complementary mechanism. Health is not primarily determined by individual choices but by social circumstances: income, education, living environment, social connectedness. The health gap between rich and poor in the United Kingdom amounts to twenty years difference in healthy life expectancy. That is not a medical problem. That is a societal design.
Jaap Huibers, my father, dietician and author of more than sixty books on nutrition, made the same argument from practice for fifty years. Prevention works. It is cheaper, more effective and more humane than treatment. But it earns nothing. No hospital benefits from healthy people. No pharmaceutical company earns from nutrition. No insurer is rewarded for investing in prevention.
The health system is a repair system. It waits until something breaks and then repairs it, as well as possible, as long as possible, at rising cost. The cost of the Dutch healthcare system exceeds one hundred billion euros per year. The percentage spent on prevention is less than four percent.
The knowledge to reverse this exists. It resides partly in scientific research, partly in culinary heritage, partly in the experience of generations who knew how to stay healthy without ever using the word prevention. They knew because it was in their food, in their daily rhythm, in their relationship with seasons and with the earth.
Restoring that knowledge is not a luxury. It is the most rational investment a society can make. Not by telling people what to eat, but by creating the conditions in which eating healthily is the simplest choice rather than the most difficult.
Sources: T. Colin Campbell, The China Study (BenBella, 2005); Michael Marmot, The Health Gap: The Challenge of an Unequal World (Bloomsbury, 2015); Jaap Huibers, personal archive and publications.
Source: Jaap Huibers, persoonlijk archief; T. Colin Campbell, The China Study (BenBella, 2005); Michael Marmot, The Health Gap (Bloomsbury, 2015)