Epidemiologist and former WHO Chronic Diseases
Director Derek Yach was interviewed recently by Riva
Greenberg, a diabetes advocate and blogger on the Huffington
Post. Yach is employed by PepsiCo as Senior Vice President on
Global Health and Agricultural Policy, a unique position as far as
we know for an epidemiologist.
Greenberg described Yach as “a noble fish trying to
change the sea around him,” and said Yach's mission is to help
address global challenges such as hunger and obesity, and the ills
they cause, by finding ways for PepsiCo to be a part of the
solution. These intriguing remarks led us to read the two-part
interview and to present some of the excerpts below.
Greenberg:
When you were at the World Health Organization you were
instrumental in reducing smoking. Why is it so much harder to get
food companies and consumers on the path of producing and eating
healthy food?
Yach:
Reducing tobacco use was much simpler. You demonize the industry,
then tax it to the sky, ban marketing and reduce smoking in public
places. Those are all very crude, easy things to do. They don't
have the nuance of a diet, the complexity of the thousands of
things available for people to eat or the numerous invested
parties.
Greenberg:
What has to happen regarding agricultural policies in order to
help stem the tide of obesity and diabetes?
Yach:
Simply, we need a far more nutrition-focused perspective embedded
in agricultural policy. In terms of health, our food policies have
failed miserably. The escalation of diabetes around the world is
an indicator of how off course we've gone.
As an epidemiologist I look at trends and see problems before they
begin and things getting better before it's noticed.
The
public hasn't yet seen our agricultural policies translate into a
direct impact on diabetes-related death, but it has. And, they are
having significant consequences regarding increased diabetes, ill
health and health care costs.
Greenberg:
How can governments and businesses work more closely with
agriculture to stem the tide of obesity and produce more healthful
foods?
Yach:
That's the critical question. When I was at the WHO, one of the
things we failed to do when working on diet and physical activity
policy was persuade agricultural organizations to look at what
agricultural supply would be if it was meeting the health and
nutrient needs of the world. I think that's the intimate bridge
between what gets grown and what is needed from a health point of
view.
Greenberg:
What initiatives is PepsiCo involved in to help
produce more nutritious foods?
Yach:
We're investing in small farmers around the world and we're
involved all along the chain, from the seed and development of
farming practices to the final product and its consumption. We've
partnered with the World Food Program and the United States Agency
for International Development to fund better seeds and drip
irrigation systems in Ethiopia so farmers can improve their yield
of chickpeas. We believe this project can potentially reduce
famine in Africa over the long term. Excess chick peas PepsiCo
doesn't use, the World Food Program is using in a ready-to-eat
food product to address famine in Pakistan.
PepsiCo is also fortifying many of its products to get
micro-nutrients into millions of people's diets. For example,
we're addressing iron deficiency in India with an iron-fortified
cookie. In Mexico, we're fortifying some of our more nutritious
cookies with Vitamin A.
Greenberg: Why don’t more companies feel a moral obligation to
move in this direction?
Yach:
I can't answer for other companies but I think a great business is
one that is doing things that are both right for the business and
right for society.
It's less the moral case but the business case that needs to be
made inside companies for doing this.
Greenberg:
Was there any resistance within or without PepsiCo to move in this
direction?
Yach:
Yes, but being a South African growing up in a period of profound
national change, I have seen there will always be resistance to
change. When you have a senior team all speaking the same message,
a CEO, Indra Nooyi, who sees the business growth
opportunities that come with developing healthier products and
investment in research and development, suddenly the change that
seems so tough, happens. And suddenly, the investment in
innovation you made is no longer visionary, but business as usual.
Greenberg:
How do you reconcile doing this work in a company that's also the
largest producer of what we think of as less than healthy snack
foods?
Yach:
I can answer that by saying there are two big strategies underway.
One is to take many of our products and make sure that the salt,
sugar and fat levels are at the lowest possible level and that
they meet nutrition criteria, without sacrificing the great taste
consumers expect from PepsiCo products.
While we invest in our core brands, we're also
growing other parts of the company in order to build that $30
billion health and wellness portfolio that I mentioned earlier.
Greenberg:
You
sound enormously hopeful.
Yach:
Absolutely. If you look at the trends for demanding healthier
foods the trend lines are upward in every market in the world.
Even in the current economic environment with people turning, in
part, to comfort foods, the overall trend toward improving health
and nutrition seems to universally be going in the right
direction. And the trend lines are echoed by steadily improving
life expectancy and steadily declining diseases we thought we
would never be able to conquer.
I was in South Africa at the start of the upswing of the AIDS
epidemic. The evidence is now that it's starting to go down. I was
very involved in tobacco control and now we've seen dramatic
decline in tobacco-related mortality like lung cancer. That was
unthinkable 15 or 20 years ago. I've seen the almost complete
collapse of measles and almost complete eradication of polio.
Over the course of my career I've seen changes that
people thought would be impossible.
I've also seen that individual and community action
can make a big difference to global health. And as an
epidemiologist I'm stimulated by changing the shape of the trend
line to make sure as bad things are going up we can slow them down
and bring them back down sooner.
We're starting to see the peak of obesity in a number of European
countries and a slowdown or first indication of reduction in parts
of the U.S. I think a decade from now we'll be looking at a
reversal of the diabetes epidemic in many parts of the world and a
continued upward trend of people living longer, healthier lives.
The full interview is available online at
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/riva-greenberg
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