You may have heard the expression knowledge is power. Well, today we're going to give you more

power to control your diet and lifestyle by giving you the facts. Welcome to the Nutrition

Facts Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Greger. It's time for the Nutrition Facts

Grab Bag where we look at the signs on a wide variety of topics. Today we start with a pressing

question, why don't health insurers embrace plant-based eating? Many of the diseases that cause a

constant drain on healthcare budgets can be prevented by proper nutrition. So why are the big

payers getting involved? I mean, even like a 1% decline in excess body fat could alone save tens

of billions. You'd sink at least the health insurance industry would try to get people to eat

healthier to try to pay out less money. Well, one could say the insurance industry actually benefits

from high healthcare cause because these rising costs are simply passed on to both individuals

and employers in terms of higher premiums and insurers take a fixed percentage of these premiums

as increasing profits. They get a piece of the pie. So the bigger the pie, the unhealthier

everyone is, the bigger their piece. As such, insurers have not done as much as they could

help reduce healthcare costs because lower costs would hurt their bottom line.

What if there was a medication that could successfully treat and even reverse heart disease,

type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, many other chronic conditions without any negative side effects

and offered the promise of dramatically reduced healthcare costs? Imagine all the advertising

there would be to promote it. Imagine how much they would charge. A drug that could not just

treat but cure diabetes and these other diseases? Then what if you were told that medication exists

today is available to everyone in unlimited quantities at low cost, but the vast majority

of the American public has never heard about it. You want a solution to significantly reduce

healthcare costs. The solution is to use food as medical treatment, specifically foods made for

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