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Why I Wrote This Book

Few issues touch every person, every family, and every community as profoundly as food. It shapes our health and longevity, drives trillions of dollars in healthcare spending and economic activity, influences the vitality of our farms and rural communities, and determines much of our impact on the planet’s soil, water, and climate. Yet despite its central role, food remains one of the least understood—and most fiercely debated—subjects of our time.

Every generation inherits ideas that seem obvious. Avoid fat. Eat complex carbs. Skip eggs. Buy organic. Restrict sugar. Count calories. These ideas have shaped how we shop, cook, raise our children, practice medicine, and write public policy.

At the same time, as these ideas have fallen short and our national nutrition crisis has grown, we are reaching for correspondingly simple policy answers. Educate people more. Add menu calorie labels. Fix farm subsidies. Each could help around the margins. Yet none explains why chronic disease has continued to rise despite decades of nutrition education, ever-expanding food choices, and extraordinary advances in medicine.

This is not a book about the latest diet or list of foods to fear. It is the story of how we arrived at this moment—how science, government, and private sector innovation shaped the modern food landscape—and how we can once again leverage this playbook to build something far better. It is the story of the remarkable scientific discoveries that are redefining our understanding of what it means to eat well, and how those discoveries can improve the health of people, communities, and the planet. And it is the story of the solutions that will reward healthier foods from the ground up, prioritizing quality over quantity, making better choices the easier and most affordable ones, and creating systems that align the interests of farmers, businesses, clinicians, and families.

Grounded in decades of research and written for every reader, Food Is Medicine offers a new way of thinking about food. At its heart, it is hopeful—a story that replaces guilt with opportunity, confusion with clarity, and deprivation with abundance. Eating well means embracing delicious meals, shared tables, joy, dignity, and the power of food to help us live healthier, fuller lives.

Praise for Food is Medicine

Watch & Listen

Hear more from Dr. Mozaffarian on the ideas behind Food Is Medicine.