Welcome to the Nutrition Facts Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Greger. Many of us are feeling

helpless in the face of the current pandemic, but the good news is there are things we can do right now

to reduce our risk of falling seriously ill and dying from COVID-19 and preventing even greater

infectious disease threats in the future. Today we ask how do we prevent the next pandemic?

And the answer has to do with changing our food system.

Inventious diseases are emerging globally at an unprecedented rate.

Literally hundreds of new pathogens have emerged, re-emerged for the last few decades,

and what we eat is responsible for most of the new diseases that have jumped from animals to humans.

In response to the torrent of emerging zoonotic or animal to human diseases,

three of the world's leading authorities, the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture

Organization, the United Nations, and the World Organization for Animal Health, held a joint

consultation to determine the key underlying causes. First on their list was the increasing demand

for animal protein. The greatest swords of democles dangling are the H5 and H7,

bird flu viruses, blanketing much of the earth. A bird flu pandemic could be devastating,

given their current upwards of Ebola-like flip of the coin death rates. Given that the emergence

of these deadly bird flu viruses, H5 and H7 and H9, are linked to intensification of the poultry sector,

there have been calls for the de-industrialization of animal production. For example,

suggested here in the annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, we're placing large industrial

units with smaller farms with lower stocking densities, potentially resulting in less stress,

less disease susceptibility, less intense infectious contact, and smaller infectious loads.

Maybe they're the ones that could use little social distancing. The American Public Health

Association, the largest and oldest association of public health professionals in the world,

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