How Food Policy Impacts Your Health with Senator Bill Frist, MD

Maintaining good health is front and center in most of our minds right now, and for good reason. As we take in the latest news on COVID-19 each day, it’s the perfect time to take a deeper look at why some of us are more susceptible to this virus. How can we collectively improve our immunity to combat this pandemic more successfully? How can we protect ourselves in the future? There are many ways. And you won’t be surprised that food and the policies that influence our food system are a huge piece of that puzzle. Today on The Doctor’s Farmacy I talk with Senator Bill Frist, a politician, doctor, farmer, author, and much more. Senator Frist is a heart and lung transplant surgeon and former U.S. Senate Majority Leader. He represented Tennessee in the U.S. Senate for 12 years and was elected Majority Leader in 2003. He led passage of the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act and the historic PEPFAR HIV/AIDS legislation that has saved millions of lives worldwide. As the founder and director of the Vanderbilt Multi-Organ Transplant Center, he performed over 150 heart and lung transplants, authored over 100 peer-reviewed medical articles, and published seven books on topics such as bioterrorism, transplantation, and leadership. Throughout this episode, we discuss how a lack of appreciation for data and science among policymakers is affecting how we handle COVID-19, as well as healthcare in general. *For context, this interview was recorded on May 1, 2020. Here are more of the details from our interview: Lack of appreciation for data and science among policymakers, as it relates to COVID-19 and healthcare in general (4:35) Is there an opportunity to improve our food system through policy at this moment in time? (7:28) Health and economic benefits of providing medically tailored meals to people with chronic disease (11:03) Food industry lobbying in Congress (15:44) Reforming our national food stamp and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs (22:06) How policy moves from an idea to implementation, and why language and storytelling are critical to this process (26:03) Training COVID-19 contract tracers to be community health workers (41:24) Addressing challenges around the way we grow food and our commodity crop food system (52:13) Our health and its effect on our national security (1:01:35) Find Sen. Frist online at http://billfrist.com/ and follow him on Facebook @SenatorBillFrist and on Twitter @bfrist. Subscribe to Sen Frist’s podcast, A Second Opinion, at https://bit.ly/aso-podcast