Those who have read my writing or attended my public talks have probably heard me use the metaphor of the goldfish to explain my thinking about health. It goes like this. (Thread.)

Imagine you have a goldfish. You want it to be healthy. So you feed it the best food, you give it a large tank so it has room to exercise, when it is sick, you take it to the vet. Then one day your goldfish dies. Why? You forgot to change its water.

Our “water” is the socioeconomic context in which we live. If this context is unhealthy, it will matter little what we do as individuals. We can exercise all we want, we can take the best drugs. But our chances of being healthy will remain slim.

So much of our health conversation is about medicines and individual behavior, so little is about the forces that influence our water. At this moment of national transition, however, there is a chance to change our approach to health, by changing our health conversation.

To help inform this change, we are today launching The Healthiest Goldfish, a weekly long-form newsletter, where I will discuss emerging data and current events through the lens of what matters most for health.

The aim of the newsletter is to inform a debate which prizes nuance, engages with the foundational forces that shape health, and incorporates reader feedback into what I hope will be a true conversation. Subscribe here: https://bit.ly/2XVIGAN