Kernels of ill health: The U.S. Farm Bill and its impact on public environmental health and nutrition

What Americans eat reflects U.S. food and agricultural policies. Over the last 8 decades, these policies have helped transform agriculture towards more industrialization, greater reliance on fossil fuels, geographic concentration, and domination by corn and soybean monocultures. Evidence points to negative impacts from this transformation on climate change, on the nutritional value of foods, on the supply of healthful fats and oils in the food supply, and on human health. Current U.S. agricultural policies, including those incorporated into periodic Farm Bills, are an integral part of the food environments we have created; they contribute to negative trends in child overweight, obesity and other diet-related disease. A public environmental nutrition approach to the epidemics in obesity and diet-related disease includes reexamining how American food and agricultural policies might be changed to encourage healthy eating, and healthier food environments. We discuss health-based recommendations for making U.S. agricultural policy support healthier eating arrived at by a group of 40 leading experts in childhood obesity, medicine, public health, nutrition, law, economics and agriculture meeting in March 2007 at Wingspread.