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Oregon Food Matters Project
The Oregon Food Matters Project is part of the Healthy Food Program at Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility. Through the OFM Project, health professionals are trained to be advocates of a healthy, sustainable food system within their facilities, practices, and communities.
Clinicians are recognized as trusted experts on health-related issues, not only in the clinic, but also in the community-at-large. Having a strong health professional voice present in the discourse over the consumption and production of sustainable food can help influence the development of effective food, farm, and health policy.
There are many ways health professionals can support healthy sustainable food systems:
Food is sustenance. But what and how we eat can also contribute to disease. Poor nutrition is a risk factor for four of the six leading causes of death nationally - heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and cancer. Nearly 58 million Americans are overweight, and 40 million Americans are obese. The US spends $147 billion to treat obesity, $116 billion to treat diabetes, and hundreds of billions to treat cardiovascular disease and cancers. Additionally, our large-scale conventional agriculture system contributes to unhealthy environments through pesticide drift, field runoff, waste burning, and diesel exhaust from transporting food long distances. The air we breathe and thousands of miles of waterways have been significantly polluted by each of these factors. We are also beginning to see alarming statistics about the impact of food systems on climate change.
Interested in Becoming a Sustainable Food Advocate?