The fastest way to make America healthier isnt another drug its dinner

The quickest way we can make America healthier, starting today, is to cook more food in our own kitchens. This isn’t for next year or after Congress passes another bill; it’s today. The more often people cook at home, the healthier they eat and the lower their risk of obesity, Type 2 diabetes and a portfolio of other chronic diseases.Imagine if every American family replaced just one takeout dinner each week with a home-cooked meal made from real ingredients.Somewhere along the way, we stopped teaching Americans how to cook.Schools ripped out home economics classes and kitchens, as families got busier.

Real food became extinct while convenience became king.Instead of learning how to roast a chicken or scramble an egg, generations grew up learning how to peel back plastic lids, hunt for $1 menus and press the microwave button. What was the inevitable result? We traded cooking for convenience, and real food for products designed in laboratories –– and America got sick. Walk through the center aisles of almost any grocery store, and you’ll find shelves lined with boxes whose ingredient labels read like a Tolstoy novel.Meanwhile, the healthiest parts of the store, the perimeter that stores the produce, meat, seafood, dairy and eggs, are often ignored because too many Americans have never been taught what to do with them.

So they default to Lean Cuisine, drive-thrus and Hot Cheetos.I understand this because I lived it. I grew up in New Jersey with two hardworking parents.Dinner wasn’t a family ritual; it was whatever could get on the table the fastest.

The microwave was the family chef (chef Mike) and fast food or pizza filled in the gaps.I honestly didn’t know eggs could be cooked any other way until I skipped school one day as a 12-year-old and stumbled onto PBS cooking shows. Watching someone transform a handful of simple ingredients into an incredible meal completely changed how I looked at food.I was intimidated at first; then I started mixin...