Today's release of a report by the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) commission, led by U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has raised awareness about the potential contributors to chronic illness in American children.
Among the possible culprits identified: processed foods, chemical exposure, stress and the overprescription of medications and vaccines.
Will Clower, a neuroscientist and CEO of Mediterranean Wellness, where Clower works with companies to improve the well-being of their employees, believes this is an important time to focus on local and regional foods, produce in particular.
For many regions — the Mediterranean, in particular — this is nothing new. In countries such as Italy, Greece and Spain, fresh fruits and vegetables have always been the foundation of a healthy, flavorful diet, free from additives and synthetic shortcuts.
Clower believes this shift away from synthetic dyes offers a pivotal opportunity for the produce industry. By embracing lessons from regions where fresh food has always been the foundation, growers and retailers can lead the way in offering the authentic, additive-free nourishment naturally found in fresh produce.
In a conversation with The Packer, Clower emphasizes the importance of eating real, whole foods and returning to the family table, noting locally grown produce is fresher, tastes better and offers higher nutritional value.
The Packer: Tell us about your background and what led to your consulting business promoting healthy eating.
Clower: In my previous life, I was a neuroscience Ph.D. researcher, and my first position was at the Cognitive Science Institute in Lyon, France, where I was introduced to this culture of health.
In France, the people are thinner, they're healthier, so as a behavioral neuroscientist, I wanted to know what the behaviors were that led to the outcome. So I wrote books to explain how healthy cultures can enjoy their rich, healthy foods while maintaining low weight, healthy hearts and longer lives.
When I returned home [to the U.S.], I wanted to find the success behind their lifestyle — to share what they do to get those results. But we don't live there, and we don't have their culture, their relaxed atmosphere — and we don't have access to all of those things. So I decided to share that this is accessible if you abstract it into principles [that people can follow anywhere].
One of those principles is to ‘eat food.' If it isn't food, don't eat it. When you look around the planet, there are lots of different approaches, whether it's the Mediterranean diet, Asian diet, Norwegian … all of these people, all of them, eat everything that they want, but everything that they eat is real food. It grew. It was part of the food chain. It's real food.
From a physiological point of view, the reason that makes sense is that we, as a species, have a relationship with the things that grow on this planet. Our body does, and that relationship is eons. We are who we are because of that relationship with our food. This physiology, it knows carrots, it knows onions. It knows fish. It has never known hydrogenated oil.
So the bizarre assortment of preservatives, stabilizers and chemicals that give our food its shelf life is not food. When we think about the movement to take out preservatives and synthetic colors, these artificial products from our foods, it's a welcome change because we're getting back to something that we used to know that our own culture of health has since forgotten.