Synopsis
The first Goodwood Health Summit, presented by Randox Health and focussed on ‘The Cost of Poor Nutrition’ convened in the Ballroom of Goodwood House with the BBC’s Justin Webb as host. Over 100 delegates prominent in the fields of health and nutrition attended in person, and hundreds more around the world followed the debate on the live stream.
The first speaker was Dr James Kinross, a senior lecturer in colorectal surgery and consultant surgeon at Imperial College London. He leads a team researching how the microbiome influences cancer and other chronic diseases of the gut, and has authored a book, Dark Matter, on the subject.
He urged us to put him out of business as a colorectal surgeon with a better understanding of the microbiome, which might help prevent the diseases he operates on, but he lamented that we are only just realising its significance just as it is suffering its worst – and possibly irrevocable – damage. A healthy microbiome is a fundamental human right, he told delegates, yet the industrialisation of food and other influences are causing us an ‘internal climate crisis’. The complexity of the microbiome and our lack of understanding of it is analogous to our understanding of deep space, he said. But it’s not all rocket science, and simple, achievable changes can be made.
Conventional medicine can be profoundly conservative, he told delegates: a sentiment echoed by the next speaker, the neuropsychiatrist and neuroscientist Professor Edward Bullmore. He described the medical establishment as conservative, hierarchical and patriarchal – the very opposite of the progressive attitudes we now require.
The idea that our mental and physical health might be linked challenges the ‘duality’ between the two so ingrained in our medical system – from how our medical professionals are trained, to separate hospital buildings and even computer systems. This ‘medical apartheid’ will take years to play out, he told us. But he’s now more convinced that revolution is possible, and the idea that what we consume and how we feel might be linked, which was considered ‘a bit bonkers’ just a decade ago, is becoming increasingly accepted.
Dr Chris van Tulleken is BAFTA-winning broadcaster, a doctor at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in London and an Associate Professor at UCL, where his research focuses on how corporations affect human health. He also works with UNICEF and The World Health Organisation on this area.
He painted a bleak picture of the power and influence of ‘Big Food’ and the ultra-processed foods it produces and promotes, including the observable physical stunting of our children that results. He described the ‘commodification of ill-health’, in which food is produced for profit rather than for nutrition, with those profits permitting the big food corporations to market their products even harder, and stifle opposition, competition and regulation.
From the floor, we heard about how such companies are adopting the tactics of the tobacco firms to frustrate attempts to limit the harm they do. Chris acknowledged some efforts on their part to improve, and for him the real villains are the politicians who fail to protect us from poor nutrition, and those supposedly independent experts who help to launder the reputation of these firms by taking their money.
Sharing the platform with Chris was Jessie Inchauspé, the biochemist, product developer, founder of GlucoseGoddess and the author of Glucose Revolution, an international bestseller translated into 40 languages. She echoed Chris’s disdain for an industry which, in her words, ‘sells you a product but takes your health and your money’. She explained just how radically our bodies’ reaction to food is changed by processing. Education is key in the fight against poor nutrition and health, she said, but also showing people how and where to start: making change easy and fun and, appropriately, bite-sized.
She told delegates, with justification, that she’d rather have a can of Diet Coke than a regular Coke or an orange juice (though none represented a healthy option), and host Justin Webb was pleased to hear that a full English breakfast might not be that bad for him.
In the final session, before questions from the delegates in the room and those watching the live stream, the Summit was honoured to hear from Professor Pekka Puska, the Finnish public health pioneer whose ground-breaking North Karelia Project starting in the 1970s proved that a systemic approach to improving health, involving every aspect of society, from social clubs to the media and big corporations could have measurable impacts on individuals.
He told the Summit that the war on tobacco would look easy by comparison with changing the world’s addiction to ultra-processed foods, but that there were still lessons to be learned, such as the efficacy of marketing bans and the need to exclude food companies from influencing their own regulation. But he ended on a more positive note: People do want to eat better, he said. And prevention is not only possible, but it really pays off.
Her Grace the Duchess of Richmond closed the Summit by thanking the speakers, and urged delegates to use what we’d learnt during the discussions in both their personal lives and their professional practices.
