By J. Scott Angle | [email protected] | @IFAS_VP
By hitching horticulture to health care, we can help heal the world while we feed it.
Doctors alone cannot reverse the astonishing current state of affairs: Globally, we spend more treating diet-related disease than we do producing food. Only 1 in 10 adults eats the recommended amount of fruits and vegetables. If the other 9 were suddenly to eat “healthy,” we’d need to double production.
That’s a huge opportunity for Florida farmers. Increased demand for your crops is a great path to sustainability.
UF/IFAS and the Florida Farm Bureau Federation together can make food the answer to a public health crisis. At the university, we call it Food is Medicine. It’s connecting what we grow and eat to disease prevention and treatment. For farmers, it could be a path to sustainability if it drives an increase in demand for the food you produce.
Here’s how. Nowhere is better suited than Florida for this. Solutions – fruits that could change health outcomes – grow on trees here.
The big Food is Medicine idea is that horticulture, nutrition and medicine together can do things like reduce diabetes, heart disease and obesity. UF/IFAS has highly recognized expertise in horticulture and nutrition and an outstanding medical center just down the hill. This proximity is unusual even among land-grant universities. It creates opportunities for our dietetic interns, for example, who do impactful work in UF Health clinics improving health outcomes.
To incentivize our agricultural researchers to work with their counterparts in medicine, we’re providing seed funding for big ideas through PLANTMED (Projects Linking Agriculture, Nutrition, and Therapeutic Medicine for Every Diet). PLANTMED has prompted some 200 faculty members from all corners of campus to self-identify as working on Food is Medicine topics and join forces on collaborative projects.
Part of the strategy is to make what’s already in your fields healthier and more attractive to consumers. For example, our scientists see dozens of publications linking broccoli to cancer prevention and zero public investment in breeding better broccoli. So they’re proceeding on their own until funding agencies see it, too.
Other research involves new crops that show potential for addressing health problems. For example, we’re working on breeding and genetics, plant composition and effectiveness of nutrient uptake for velvet bean. This crop’s unique production of L-Dopa can lessen symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.
Whether it’s legacy crops or new alternatives, you have a central role to play.
There is no Food is Medicine without the food.
J. Scott Angle is the University of Florida’s Senior Vice President for Agriculture and Natural Resources and leader of the UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS).
