Nutrition in America: How We Got Here with Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian

MOPs & MOEs

This is a rerun of an episode we did a year ago. As our last holiday rerun before we get into fresh content, this one helps to set the stage for our first couple episodes for 2025 which will discuss the "Make America Healthy Again" movement, aka MAHA. You might be surprised that many of our biggest problems today are the results of solutions to the problems we faced a few decades ago.

This episode is all about nutrition in America: How did we get here? (Hint: there are actually some very good reasons for all the processed food) What problems is our diet creating? (Hint: it's more than just obesity) And what can we do to start fixing it?

That's a huge topic, but our guest is one of the most qualified person to tackle it. Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian is a cardiologist, Jean Mayer Professor of Nutrition at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, Professor of Medicine at Tufts School of Medicine, and an attending physician at Tufts Medical Center. Recently he also became the founding Director of the Tufts Food is Medicine Institute. His work aims to create the science and translation for a food system that is nutritious, equitable, and sustainable.

Dr. Mozaffarian has authored more than 500 scientific publications on dietary priorities for obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases, and on evidence-based policy approaches and innovations to reduce diet-related diseases and improve health equity in the US and globally. Areas of focus include defining healthy diets, nutritional biomarkers, Food is Medicine interventions in healthcare, business innovation and entrepreneurship, and food policy.

He is one of the top cited researchers in medicine globally, he has served in numerous advisory roles including for the US and Canadian governments, American Heart Association, World Health Organization, and United Nations. His work has been featured in an array of media outlets. Thomson Reuters has named him as one of the World's Most Influential Scientific Minds In 2023, Dr. Mozaffarian was nominated by President Biden to serve on the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition (PCSFN).

Dr. Mozaffarian received his B.S. in biological sciences from Stanford University, M.D. from Columbia University. He took his residency at Stanford, and was a fellow in cardiovascular medicine at the University of Washington, where he also received his MPH. He earned a Doctorate in Public Health from Harvard. Before being appointed as Dean at Tufts in 2014, Dr. Mozaffarian was at Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health for a decade and clinically active in cardiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He is married, has three children, and actively trains as a Fourth Degree Black Belt in Taekwondo.

For an overview of the initiatives that the Tufts Food is Medicine Institute is tackling ⁠see their fact sheet.⁠

If you want to learn more about the Food Compass drama that we briefly discuss in the episode, ⁠check out this blog post summarizing the situation.⁠

You can find ⁠the text of the SWEET Act here⁠, which is a proposal to tax sugar sweetened beverages and use the revenue from that tax to fund research on diet-related health conditions.