#849 - Calley Means - Is Our Food Supply Making Us Sick?
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Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Kali Means. He's an entrepreneur, health and wellness advocate, and an author. Why is America struggling with all-time highs of obesity and illness? Healthcare has never been more advanced, and yet levels of healthiness have never been worse. What's going on? And is there a way to make America healthy again?

Expect to learn why modern health is so broken, the healthcare system's biggest issues, which health problems are unique to Americans, what is wrong with American food compared to the rest of the world, the most harmful environmental toxins to avoid, what politicians are not doing from a regulatory standpoint to help Americans, and much more.

I really tried my hardest to stress test Kali's ideas today. I don't want fear-mongering and unqualified

concerns around the things that people are putting in their bodies. But it seems pretty robust. The stuff that he is talking about, the bottom line is you don't need to look far to see how poor the health outcomes are for most Americans. Globally, just FYI, obesity is now the number one form of malnutrition in the world.

So you have starvation at one end and you have obesity at the other. They're both forms of malnutrition. And there are more obese people, nearly double, than there are starving people. So yeah, Cali is kind of at the forefront of a lot of this stuff. So there is an awful lot to take away from today. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Cali Means. ♪♪♪

Why is modern health so broken? The fundamental incentive that every single lever of healthcare makes more money when a child is sicker for longer periods of time. I mean, let's get out of conspiracy theories. Let's get out of any conjecture. Just as a fundamental statement of economic fact, I want everyone to assess this for themselves and everyone to think about this.

But you look at insurance companies. People don't realize this, but the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, they set a 15% medical loss ratio. So insurance companies can only make a 15% profit margin. But by law, they can raise premiums to get that 15%. So it was a big populist thing with Obamacare. It's like, why are insurance companies making such high profit? But when you put it that it's only 15% and they can raise prices to get that 15%, what does that incentivize?

It incentivizes higher costs. What does that mean? It means more people getting sick. The insurance industry is directly unimpeachably incentivized for more Americans to get sick. And what has happened since Obamacare? Premiums have doubled in the past 10 years. So healthcare costs have been the highest driver of inflation. And I talked to, you know, on this journey, talking to many insurance executives,

Reach out behind closed doors. They say it's absolutely obvious. Nobody's trying to be evil at those insurance companies, but when it comes between, you know, incentivizing exercise, incentivizing healthy eating, and just kind of ignoring that and having more and more people get sick and paying out more and more costs,

That's what they're incentivized to do. Obviously, pharmaceutical companies, 95% of medical spending, 95% of pharma sales are on chronic disease treatments, okay? So it's when you get heart disease, get kidney disease, get cancer, get these conditions that are lifetime management. They're lifetime management drugs. That's a beautiful invention.

because chronic disease that has to be managed, not cured, is recurring revenue. So there hasn't been new antibiotic strains invented in the past 30 years because that's a pill that you take and get off. It's

It's all about chronic disease management. So just fundamentally, when a pharmaceutical company can get you on this chronic disease pharmaceutical treadmill, that's a profitable patient. And when it happens earlier and earlier and that kid gets sick but doesn't die, just suffers, that economically is a good thing. And this is why there's this devil's bargain where fundamentally, nine out of 10 killers of Americans, the conditions that are torturing our lives are lifestyle related.

and you have heart disease rates exploding among kids. You have cancer rates now exploding among kids. You have- - What do you mean when you say kids? Under 18? - Yeah, under 18. The New York Times recently, pediatric cancer rates are at an all time high this year in 2024. The New York Times recently did an article about this on the front page. It said cancer rates are exploding among kids. Nobody knows why.

So the pharmaceutical industry isn't interested in why that's happening, and we know why it's happening. It's happening because of environmental factors, food, sedentary lifestyle. They are profiting from that. And just a good long-term patient is a healthy patient. So cancer rates have gone up among kids.

prescriptions of statins have doubled among high schoolers in just the past five years. We all know about antidepressants. They're prescribed like candy. So just if you just think about it, what a pharmaceutical company wants, a healthy, thriving child that's exercising, that's eating healthy, that's in the sunlight, that's not a profitable patient. So that's the pharmaceutical interest. Why are you focusing on kids? Much more of the population that isn't a kid than is a kid.

So two reasons. I think what is unimpeachable about the kids argument is it takes away this thing I used to say a lot growing up and still a conservative. I consider myself about personal responsibility, right? It's not a personal responsibility, free choice situation that we have an epidemic of heart disease, diabetes, obesity among children. Right now, uh,

Right now, 50% of teens are overweight or obese. It's like 20% of six-year-olds. Like the childhood obesity rate in Japan is 3%. So I'd like to talk about kids because I think obviously, you know, your listeners, many of us, people reading books, listening to podcasts, we're on a personal responsibility journey.

but there's something systemic happening. And- So in a way, you're sort of using children as kind of a canary in the coal mine. They're a litmus test in one way of what is being imposed when personal responsibility is put to one side. Yeah, I don't think parents are trying to mass poison their kids, but that is what's happening. So just to kind of reframe, because I really want this episode with yourself to be a one-stop shop, selfishly for me, but also for everybody that's listening, to understand-

When we hear chronic disease, chronic inflammation, metabolic health, environmental toxins, everything like that,

to go through the full works of that, to understand the system behind the scenes and to hear your sort of proposal for what's going on. So it sounds like so far there are incentives amongst insurance companies because their profits are capped. If they're capped at 15%, then what that means is that you actually, 15% can grow. It's just not going to grow as a proportion. So you need to make the entire pie bigger so that the 15% of that increases. Okay. Also, when it comes to pharmaceutical companies, a chronically sick person

is going to make you more money than somebody who you were able to nip in the bud early on. What's next as a part of this system? Just go through the healthcare stack. The next is the hospitals. Fundamentally, hospitals. And hospitals are the biggest employers of Americans in the country.

The healthcare industry is both the largest and fastest growing and most employed industry in the company. And most of those folks are at hospitals. So the fundamental incentive structure for a hospital to grow is interventions. That is how my friends from Harvard Business School, they go and become administrators and executives at hospitals. They are hired and fired based on how many beds they're filling and how many interventions they're doing. What's an intervention?

an intervention, coming in, getting a surgery, getting chronic disease treatment. A lot of our friends have autoimmune conditions, Crohn's disease. The standard of care for Crohn's disease is going into an outpatient center once a month and getting various IVs. When we make issues chronic, we talk a lot about obesity. Now the standard of care for obesity is lifetime ozipic shots, lifetime SSRI prescriptions when you're depressed. When you have these situations

where each chronic condition we can go through is treated as a lifetime management plan that not only helps the pharmaceutical industry, which is prescribing those lifetime drugs, but it involves the patient coming in and getting continued care and continued management for conditions that often can be reversed. So

You have a situation where when you have chronically sick patients, they're racking up pharmaceutical billings, but they're also racking up hospital charges. As my sister, Casey Means, who, you know, my co-author, Stanford Med School surgical resident, it's called eat what you kill. I mean, that's what she's indoctrinated with at Stanford Med School and in residency. People's bonuses, their pay is based on how many

interventions they prescribe. My sister remembers at Stanford Medical School seeing folks in the oncology unit, the cancer unit, sobbing in the hallways because people with stage four pancreatic cancer, the attending surgeon said, if they come in here with stage four pancreatic cancer, they're getting cut open. Often they're going to die anyway. Just statistically, these interventions, these surgical procedures aren't even that effective. But

When you have the power of the medical system and you're going to make a million dollars from going the surgical intervention route, even if it's ineffective, and make no money if the patient goes and enjoys their remaining time of life and goes on a more holistic journey, the doctor in that lab coat has a lot of power and there's a clear economic incentive for them to prescribe that intervention path.

Okay, so I always get stick for this on the internet, so I'm ready to get stick for it again. Good. I always default to non-conspiracism. I'm very sort of non-conspiratorial. And it sounds at the moment, so far, like the insurance companies both want to purposefully drive up the price of everybody's healthcare so that they can make profits regardless of the thing that they're supposed to be able to provide, which is access to insurance.

easy healthcare, that the pharmaceutical companies also are not in the business of creating drugs to make people's lives better. They're exclusively in it for the nefarious purpose of trying to maximize profits, which means making sub-quality drugs which require dependency for diseases that are only detected after someone's got there. And then...

The people that all of us know, every single person listening to this knows somebody who's a nurse or who's a doctor or who's a surgeon or who's a whatever. These people are also complicit, fully complicit. They're on board. They're giving people surgeries that they don't need. They're prescribing them drugs that they don't need. They're not suggesting them solutions that would be better for that. To me, I know people that are doctors and I know that they don't think like that.

All of them, at least my friends. Now I have a very small, very small cohort. It's like five people that are doctors in America and maybe like another five in the UK.

how, sort of square that circle to me, just how sort of, and how cancerous are the systems? And is it bad actors? Is it just incentives? Is it people putting profits over principles? What's the motive here? I loved your conversation with Ben Shapiro about really being skeptical of conspiracy theories. And I was actually thinking a lot about our conversation. It's a core point, an argument I want to make to you, want to make to listeners. You should be very skeptical of

conspiracy theories, but we also need to be skeptical when the largest industry of the country has certain economic incentives and assuming that systemically everyone within that system is going against the economic incentives structured by that industry. Again, the core point, let's get out of the motivations, 100%. Doctors are amazing people. I think what's tragic and what Casey talks about in the book is that she joins Stanford Med School, right? She did not join to oversee sick patients.

Every doctor at Stanford Med School and other med schools, right? There's easier ways to make money than trying to sabotage the American people. So what happens? We take the rest of the prices. We put them in the medical system. We saddle them with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. Now, if you do ask any doctor that's thinking, they will acknowledge patients under their care are not getting better, right? What Casey did is she looked around and she's doing surgery, surgery after surgery after surgery. She's doing head and neck surgery.

surgery. And people are so inflamed in their sinuses that every day, multiple times a day, she's cutting open their sinuses, they're passed out and taking out the remnants of their inflammation. Now she, again, president of her Stanford undergrad class, top of her class, top of her med school, NIH research. She's 11 years into surgical residency. And she, for the first time, for the first time, it occurred to her, why is that patient getting inflammation? She never asked that question. She had an out-of-body experience. And then she looked at the patient's charts.

Every single patient she was doing inflammation surgery on had at least six other comorbidities, right? More than six on average. So they were seeing the endocrinologist for the diabetes. They were seeing the cardiologist for the heart issues. They were inevitably depressed. They had kidney issues. They had all these separate issues. And she not once has spoken to another doctor in those systems.

So she started asking, are these things interconnected? She actually started speaking to a patient she did sinusitis surgery on who had a migraine. And she asked, okay, well, I read on PubMed that might be your migraine and even your inflammation is tied to food. She was reprimanded by her attending surgeon. Her attending surgeon said, don't be a pussy.

You didn't go to dietary, diet school, nutrition school. Let the nutritionists handle that. They didn't go to medical school. Serious medicine is cutting people open. Serious medicine is issuing prescription. The first day of Stanford Med School, right? Philip Pizzo, the former dean of Stanford Med School, lectured the students.

And he said, the American patients are lazy. The American patients are going to be sedentary. They're going to eat their Big Macs. They're going to drink their Big Gulps. And we are here to clean up the mess. That idea is indoctrinated into doctors. So we have a medical system. It sounds to me, to push back there, it sounds to me like they are there to clean up the mess. That it isn't the job of a surgeon to tell somebody who's 400 pounds to

you should go back five years and fucking change your diet. This gets to your first question. And I think this is really the answer. You have to look at what a system incentivizes people to do. Now what people say, or even what people's motivations are, this is the genius of our healthcare system is that every single person has plausible deniability, right? So the Dean of Stanford Medical School, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not a nutritionist. That's not my, but then who should be in charge of talking about why people get sick? Maybe the NIH? The

Maybe the FDA? Well, the former head of the FDA is now on the board of Pfizer. And the FDA is 75% funded by the pharmaceutical industry. Maybe it should be the media. The media, the mainstream media is 50% funded by the pharmaceutical industry and doesn't say a word about it. So the question is, who is the gatekeeper? You're totally right. And that is exactly what senior people...

in the academic world told me. And they very aggressively tell me that. I've gotten called and screamed at by top administrators and doctors at Tufts Nutrition School, at Harvard, at Stanford. I've been threatened, right? They say it's not our problem.

But what has created this toxic stew where Americans are getting so sick? Why are Americans dying seven years earlier than the Japanese? Why are Americans, 80% you talk about kids, obviously that's the counter in the coal mine. 80% of Americans right now are overweight or obese. As Casey says, if you were obese in the United States 100 years ago, you were in the circus. There were case reports written about it. It was so rare. So something astronomical is happening. Now you're more than half of the population.

Now, if you're a thin kid in high school, it's weird, right? Used to drive by a bus stop and see a bunch of kids. In the 1960s, there was one fat kid who was, that was the weird one. Now, it's weird to see a thin kid. I mean, even if you look at South Park-

you know, you have one fatso. Right. As they call him. Right. And then the rest of the kids are a normal size. Right. And that's not how it is in high schools right now. I mean, every single... So the exploring who has plausible deniability is the key thing. You know, again, a lot of my kind of

The view is informed by, I liken a lot of like to Stanford Med, or excuse me, to Harvard Business School where I went. You've got a lot of good people. You've got a lot of very, I would say smart, high horsepower people.

85% of the class goes, works for food companies. I have friends that work at Pepsi. I have friends that work for Pfizer, right? They go and some of them are doctors, MDs too. It's like we are taking really good people and putting them in these industries that have co-opted our regulatory institutions and are fundamentally as economic incentive, their business models predicated on Americans being addicted, Americans being in fear, Americans being fat or Americans being sick or Americans being more depressed and frankly, Americans being more infertile. So, that's,

That's the problem with the system that Casey realized why she spoke out, radicalized me, helped me put the pieces together. Nobody has responsibility for the health of Americans. That's the problem. Nobody in the system. Yeah. Eventually the book stops with

We don't know. Like maybe that guy. And then he goes, well, no, it's that guy. And then they say, no, it's that guy. And you just keep on bouncing. And what they say and what they indoctrinate and what they say at the top of their lungs is that it falls on the American people. Right? So, so what everyone's saying is that, well, the American people are getting fat. The American people are eating themselves to death, but the

problem is that in America, we rightfully have trust of the medical system. And there's some degree, it's not a partisan issue, there's some degree of responsibility. It does feel a lot like if you were a firefighter who turned up at a house that was burning and said, I mean, you know, it's really, they've got the water in there. That's kind of their job to put this out. Are you not employed precisely to put out

You go, well, yeah, I know, but it's on them. We provide them the water. They've got the tools to be able to make this work. Well, absolutely. And Casey, you just talked about this. There needs to be people there to clean up the mess. It's not like we should abolish the medical system and not have triple bypass surgeries. It's not like we should have endocrinology care for kids. It's not that we shouldn't have cardiology care for kids. It's not that we shouldn't have growing psychiatric departments. The question is, what nobody's asking is, why is the largest building

in every major city a gleaming new pediatric center. Literally, you know, the governor of Texas recently came to Houston to open up the largest hospital complex in the world. They bragged actually that you could see it from space. The Republicans and Democrats, right, when we build new hospitals, we're going to be

large parts of which are pediatric centers. This is heralded as progress. Nobody, not the politicians, not the doctors, not the NIH, nobody is asking why so many kids are getting sick. Well, that's such a good point. It seems from the outside like philanthropy or care or charity, we're working hard on health. And you go,

No, you're working hard on fixing disease. You're not working hard on health. Working hard on health is that there are smaller hospitals, not bigger ones. This is my one point, honestly, like working with politicians right now. I cannot express...

how little this point is understood. I mean, I was sitting across the table from a chair of a major health committee in Congress. And this simple point that nobody in the health system is asking about the health and thriving of Americans, it is all R&D and all to generate cash for industries once people get sick and manage sickness, not promote health.

This hasn't dawned on senior policymakers and the senior most people creating our health institutions. We've been so desensitized. And I think this devil's bargain between the food industry making us sick and the healthcare industry profiting has so impacted all of our institutions that that simple point is not known. And I will say, and I think there's optimism from the bottoms up and the top down, the more we can promote that point, the more we can...

you know, tell Americans that they should feel emboldened to get outside the medical system when it comes to chronic conditions. And we can talk about a chronic versus acute. And the more, frankly, policymakers understand that the problem with healthcare is not page 300 of the Medicare Part D. It's not about what we hear about on the news of like, even whether it's Medicare for all or socialism or this, the problem

problem is no matter what system we have, it's that it's incentivized for Americans to be sick. That's the problem. And the more that we can realize that simple fact and ask that question whenever we're dealing with the medical system, is this person across the table for me incentivized if I get sick? That will change the world. So it's incentives, incentives. Yeah. And they're good people. Like we have to, like this is not...

the plausible deniability is so pronounced, right? That your friends that are doctors in an emergency room or doctors in a cardiology ward, they're saving people, right? They're seeing time after time after time Americans come in with absolutely just depressing conditions and they're going to die soon. But they're not promoting health, right? And the interventions they're

prescribing, right? The stans or the emergency surgical procedures is not curing anything. As Casey said with her head and neck surgery,

The sinusitis patients came back. Almost everyone under her knife was under there a year ago for the inflammation, right? When you do all these procedures, you are saving that person in that moment, but you're not curing anything. So they're not creating any health for Americans. They are cleaning up the mess. And somebody at some point in time needs to say, how do we reorient the healthcare system to promote health?

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Okay, we need to define some terms. Please talk to me from a healthcare perspective, the biggest issues, you know, you've mentioned obesity, you've mentioned a few like information and stuff like that. I want to know, first off, biggest issues in healthcare from a high level perspective. Well, I don't mean to dispute the premise of the question, but I think I think that question is really important to get right. I'd reframe it slightly.

What the medical system wants you to do is answer that question in particular silos. They want, oh, it's heart disease. That's the number one killer. Or it's diabetes. That's a big issue. Or it's depression. The mission we're on. The one medical point Casey and I are trying to explain is that all of these chronic conditions are branches of one trachea.

tree. It's a lie that Casey graduates from Stanford Med School and she chooses between 42 specialties. That's what doctors have to do right now. They choose 42 specialties, okay? So we siloed the body into neurology, into the skin, right? Into dermatology, into the head and neck surgery, right? Into cardiology, into brain surgery. So a doctor chooses like one narrow part of the body and then there's 82 subspecialties,

So the dean I mentioned, excuse me, so the dean was Philip Pizzo and then Lloyd Miner is the current dean of Stanford Med School. He was a head and neck surgeon like my sister, but he's the paradigm of great medicine because he did a fellowship and he focused on two millimeters of the body. He actually focused his entire career on like one little part of the nose.

And that's the highest echelon of medicine, the more specialized you can be. And that's super profitable. As I said, you look at the notes and they've seen, you know, patients seen nine different doctors. The average American dies having seen 18 specialists, individual specialists in their entire life. So this siloing of disease and this question of like, well, is it a heart disease? No, we are being besieged by chronic disease. So let me just say it again.

90% of medical costs and 9 out of 10 killers of Americans are preventable and often reversible lifestyle conditions. So the obvious ones are heart disease and diabetes. Okay? But diabetes is not a silo. Diabetes is an arbitrary point of blood sugar dysregulation. Okay? It's arbitrary. It doesn't actually mean anything medically. It's just if your blood sugar is at a certain point, you've got diabetes. Okay?

Blood sugar dysregulation, which more than 50% of the country has, is a root of many other things. It's highly tied to many forms of cancer. Breast cancer is highly tied to blood sugar dysregulation. It's exploded in the past generation. If you don't have prediabetes or diabetes, you have a very low chance of getting breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, many other forms of cancer. So that's connected. It's not just one silo.

And if you change our diet and these completely reversible and preventable conditions, you could take heart disease diabetes rates down to zero. But then you get to some less obvious ones. You get to Alzheimer's. Alzheimer's is now called type 3 diabetes. If you do not have prediabetes or diabetes, you have a very low chance of getting Alzheimer's. Alzheimer's in our brain is part of our body.

diabetes, prediabetes, blood sugar dysregulation, or cells having problems creating energy. 20% of the energy is created in our brain. It's not some siloed thing. So if this energy dysregulation

from our environment, from our food, from our sedentary lifestyles. Our cells not functioning correctly is showing up in other parts of body. It shows up in the brain. So if you're diabetic, for instance, you have four times higher chance of getting depression or committing suicide. You know, our brain is connected to the rest of our body. So all of these things, kidneys, upper respiratory infections, even COVID. COVID, it

It's come out very clearly. It was like four comorbidities the average person that died of COVID had. I mean, it's almost a definitive statement you can make. If your five metabolic biomarkers were in normal range, and that's HDL, triglycerides, blood sugar, blood pressure, and waistline, if those five biomarkers that define metabolic dysfunction were in a normal range, you had an almost 0% chance of dying of COVID no matter what age you are. So all these things are connected.

And that point is obfuscated by the medical system. It's a huge problem. You mentioned that these are lots of branches on a single tree. What would be the trunk of the tree? Metabolic dysfunction. Metabolic dysfunction. Okay, so defining some terms. Chronic disease, chronic inflammation, metabolic health. What are they? Chronic disease is something that will not kill you right away.

is how I define it. If you have a infection, if you have a major acute cardiac issue where you need surgery, if you have a complicated childbirth, if you have an inflamed appendix, the medical system is a miracle. That's acute. Go to the medical system. So the way to think about it is if something has a chance of killing you or your child imminently,

Rush to the hospital, give the doctor the benefit of the doubt. Peter Attia, the first graph in his book, talks about acute and infectious conditions, okay?

That is 100% the contributors, advancements in acute infection to the doubling of life expectancy we always hear about. So you'll have people come on and they'll say, well, the medical system, you know, there's problems, but it's a miracle. We doubled life expectancy in the past 100 years. He takes out chronic conditions, right? It's contributed nothing to life expectancy. And that's 95%, 90 to 95% of medical spending. It's all acute and infectious disease management.

That's where medical miracle, if we think of a medical miracle, we're probably thinking of something that's an acute surgical or pharmaceutical intervention like antibiotics. So if something is going to kill you right away, if your child has an infection, go to the doctor. Now, acute, excuse me, with chronic,

Let's think about what's happening. I always take it to kids because I think it's elucidating to the rest of the adults. But high cholesterol, what happens? Oh, you got to go on a statin. It's risky if you don't go on a statin. The kid's a little bit sad, got to go on an SSRI, right? The kid's a little fidgety, got to go on Adderall. The kid has high blood sugar, right, in that form. And now the American Academy of Pediatrics is saying that if a child is overweight, overweight, 50% of 12-year-olds,

that is ozempic like that that's the guidelines it's a medical guidelines it's not wait and see has this been released as a press announcement a big press announcement for the american academy pediatrics about eight months ago the american academy pediatrics which sets the standard of care which is endowed by congress to set the standard of care for pediatrics it's 90 for again not conspiratorial just just facts is 90 funded by the pharmaceutical industry this danish company novo nordics which makes ozempic the ninth most valuable company in the world

is a huge funder of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which came out with a press release. It can be Googled where it says, don't wait and see. Wait and see is out the window. Emergency, quick, aggressive interventions when that 12-year-old's overweight is what the standard of care is. Okay, chronic inflammation.

Chronic inflammation is our body's reaction to a foreign invader. Inflammation can be good, right? Inflammation is actually our body's response to something foreign in our body. It's an evolutionary, very beneficial thing. But why are we chronically inflamed?

Right? We are ingesting things through our food and through our environment that we aren't evolutionarily made to have in our bodies. Our bodies, for whatever reason, the majority of Americans...

think that there's something foreign inside us that they need to be reacting to. So you've had guests on and we talk, you know, have all these dietary debates, right? You know, is there the right, you know, human randomized control study on seed oils, on the food colorings, on all these chemicals we have in our food? Now, I think there's a real place for that.

But we've taken leave of our common sense a little bit, I think. Seed oils did not exist in this world 100 years ago. They are a highly processed, manufactured ingredient, right? They are in our food because it's cheap. And descendants of John D. Rockefeller, after finding a way to create this product, this engine lubricant, figured they could make more money by putting it in the American diet as a cheaper oil, okay?

Not conspicuous oil, just the facts. That's true, but I'm yet to see any studies, and I avoid seed oils also. I'm yet to see a single study that says that the consumption of seed oils as a seed oil is actually related to any negative health outcomes.

You're playing on a terrible, when you start looking for the studies of whether it's the dyes in our food, of whether it's the seed oils, of whether it's the highly processed grains sprayed with glyphosate, where there's not a study in the United States definitively that says that's bad, but people that spray glyphosate on our crops need to wear hazmat suits. And it's literally a herbicide that kills any organism that it touches. You get into a situation where just on the chronic inflammation front, let's just use common sense here, which we've been completely divorced from.

in our medical discussion, whatever it is, we are just by definition putting items in our body that did not exist throughout human evolutionary history. The foundation of our diet, I talk about this a lot, the three things that make up halted processed food are refined sugar, which is a new invention in the past 100 years, highly processed grains, which are not grains, they're taking the fiber off, they're basically frankenfoods,

And then seed oils, which just, again, not getting into any peer-reviewed study, is a new invention, right? That's highly, highly processed. They have to use bleach and other things to make it. These foods are going into our bodies, among many other environmental toxins, and causing our bodies to react with chronic inflammation and be in a constant state of stress. Like,

If you get into this thing, it's getting into the same thing with the 42 specialties. It's getting in the same thing of like, okay, no, no, no, it's not the sugar. It's this, it's not the glyphosate. It's this. That's the game we try to get podcasters to talk about while working for the food industry. Like that's why we create so many studies. Like I'm,

I think it's very important, of course, to be evidence-based, but the purpose of studies is PR. Right. So you're saying that even if you're looking at the evidence-based community, that can only be downstream from what evidence is available. And the evidence which is available is based on the studies that have been conducted. And the studies that have been conducted are going to be

incentivized or paid for or focused on by people who have incentives for that particular area to be looked at. The Atlantic magazine, when we did our testimony to the Senate with health leaders last week, ran an article calling us the woo-woo caucus and attacking us for not being science and evidence-backed by saying glyphosate might be a problem, right?

The Atlantic is the billionaire owner, you know, the guy who started Atlantic made his money from pharma and it's heavily funded by the pharmaceutical industry, right? They use the fact that the FDA to this day says glyphosate, which is a herbicide sprayed on our crops from China often, again, that kills every organism on site.

that that there's not evidence to say that that's harmful for the US diet. So you have the studies saying that, you have the media prompting that, you have the people that should be kind of the referees and protectors of kids and protectors of us, the government, the media, other referees, they're actually referees for the industry that's paying them. Pharma, let's not forget, right, owns the regulatory agencies, pays 75% of the FDA, as we talked about,

but is also five times more higher political donator than the oil industry. By far the largest, they're the largest literal payer of politicians themselves. So you have all the referees basically saying you're anti-science using the rigged scientific studies. Now, I'm not saying there shouldn't be any like evidence-based

work. Although I would argue that if you fire every single nutrition researcher in the country, literally, and replace it... No, I'm not joking. If you fire and cut... I'm actually not being hyperbolic. If you fire every single nutrition advisor...

in the country and all funding whatsoever for nutrition research and have a principle that we should lower our percentage of ultra-processed food consumption from 70% to 20%, it would radically just unleash human capital in this country and unleash health.

Another thing we should consider doing is firing every single nutrition advisor and all funding for nutrition studies and just adopt France's guidelines. If you want to be evidence-based, the French live six years longer. Are we lazier than the French? What a day. You managed to insult both US Congress and the French in the same sentence there. But yeah, yeah. The last point I'll make, this kind of a spiritual point, is

Clearly just something wrong is happening holistically with getting detached from our farmers or soil like natural food that we're putting in our body. We're raping the soil with our industrial agriculture where a tomato in the United States has 70% lower nutrient content than a tomato grown in the United States.

50 years ago. There's something really bad happening with our ultra-processed food. And trying to isolate one little variable when we're just putting all this manufactured chemical-aiding crap in our bodies instead of just having a higher-level perspective of it, I think is playing into the system. And we don't need to isolate one variable. We need a fundamental reset of getting back to whole food as an urgent medical imperative, I think. Yeah.

That's an interesting framing, that the problem is so multifaceted and coming from so many different directions that trying to individually snipe each one of these different... It's playing the game of the enemy. But also ineffective because, you know, for each one that you take down, there's still 50, 49, 48 that are there. And by the time that you get to 45, five more have been added that have changed something else. So...

You've mentioned a couple of times you've sort of compared America specifically to other countries, to France, to Japan. What is uniquely happening in America? Is it food and drugs and the quality of the municipal water or is it something else? What's the comparison between Europe and Europe's food and better environment and virome and...

air quality and environmental toxins versus everyone else. Yeah. So what are the components of metabolic health? It's multifactorial, 100%. But food is really important. Food, we 3D print ourselves and 3D print our bodies out of food. So you've got to start with food. And what

is happening to our food. We have a much higher percentage consumption of ultra-processed food in America as a starter than Europe and Japan and every other developed country. We're at 70% for kids. And again, like, and you have folks on that I really respect come on and, oh, let's not demonize any particular food. And sure, you can get into nuance, but I go back to what is ultra-processed food? Ultra-processed food is a

addiction instruments created by the cigarette industry. We all have to just understand that. So if we're going to talk about facts, let's just understand that the cigarette industry was the largest food producer in the 1990s.

Can you create that lineage for me? Tell the story.

So they had the largest cash piles in human history, the history of capitalism. They had high balance sheets, high cash piles. And as they saw the writing on the wall that cigarettes were declining, they started strategically buying food companies. So the biggest M&A deals in the 1980s, the three biggest M&A deals, the 1980s Wall Street, kind of all this M&A activity, the three biggest deals in human history up until 1990 were cigarette companies buying food companies. It was...

RJ Reynolds buying Nabisco and then craft excuse me Philip Morris bought Kraft and US Foods which is a big conglomerate just for the people who aren't so business pilled what's downstream from some of those big companies more brands that people might actually recognize almost every single brand that we know has has disaggregated from US Foods which is like every brand we could you know you've got those viral charts where it shows like four companies one of those Disney Disney owns

- Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Every show that you watch. - Yeah, yeah. So there's these viral charts going around where it's like five companies and it's like thousands of sub-brands. This is those brands, those three companies. So they were all owned in the 1990s by cigarette companies and RJ Reynolds and Philip Morris were the two largest food producers in the world.

So this wasn't like some, you know, when you talk about don't demonize food, I'm absolutely demonizing ultra-processed food. This food was created by the cigarette industry, literally. And what happened when the cigarette industry bought these food companies? They shifted their scientists from the cigarette department to the food department. And when I say weaponized, I'm not being conspiratorial and I'm not being hyperbolic. They put the world's highest paid scientists...

that they had employed at their companies and asked, how do we make this food more addictive? They're not trying to kill people, right? They're probably going home and thinking they're doing good things. They're making palatable, great food. They're creating cheaper calories for lower income Americans. They're providing joy, right? They're making Dunkaroos and all these fun things and cereal that's really fun. So again, the plausible deniability, but that's what they did. They weren't trying to make things healthy.

And then what were they good at, the cigarette companies? They were good at the addiction, so they did that. And then they were good at lobbying. The 1980s was way too late for the Surgeon General to come out. They delayed that 20 years. They used the same playbook that they're still using today. They bought off the USDA and created the food pyramid.

The food pyramid was the deadliest document, I believe, in American history. The thing in 1992 that said that we should have carbs and basically processed food and sugar at the base of the pyramid. And that meat was kind of this niche thing and fruits and vegetables were up here. It was carbs and processed food. And my parents and all the parents in the 90s raising kids thought they were doing good things for getting their kids the crackers and low-fat crap.

What's the truth behind the story of how that food pyramid was created? Who did it? Why it happened?

The cigarette industry funded research at Harvard from the Sugar Research Council. They created the Sugar Research Council and the Sugar Research Council, they didn't even hide the name. Sounds like a gay research council. Yeah. Now it's like at least they hide it a little bit. It's like the Health Nutrition Freedom Council. Now it was the Sugar Research Council. So the Sugar Research Council was the chief donor to the Harvard Nutrition School. Yeah.

So the Harvard, the chief nutritionist at Harvard created reports in the 1980s saying sugar doesn't cause obesity and is a key important ingredient.

part of a child's energy balance. And that added sugar is actually a really good thing. So the foundational research, everyone can Google this, the foundational research of the food pyramid was research from Harvard. Look at the report down at the, who's funding it? The Sugar Research Council funded it. So- It's like a human centipede of-

what goes in and what goes out. This is not complicated. I mean, I worked, you know, years later for the food industry, but we know that people, what, what, what higher, what higher level do we have than a report from Harvard? Like, what higher level do we have than a report from the, excuse me, from the NIH? So this is something that I was interested to ask you, which is, I understand how the system can be rigged, how incentives behind the scenes about profit motives and so on and so forth. But it,

It seems very much that it's not simply the ultra-processed foods, very palatable, that there is both a top-down swaying of the wind, but there's also a bottom-up culture of the way that people eat beyond this is simply very, very healthy. And that's one of the injections. That's one of the ways that you can bottom-up rig the culture as opposed to just rigging the system through education, incorrect education.

Yeah, I get really sad about thinking people kind of decry American culture and say the Italians and the French have a better food culture. I mean-

This is where I really try to make a clear point, which is that our culture is defined by our policies often. And when we have completely co-opted our dietary guidelines to say ultra-processed food and sugar and carbs are really good, Americans listen to that. And in the 1990 to 2000, the 10 years since the food pyramid, our consumption of carbs as a percentage of our diet went up 20%.

So I think we actually did have a relatively good culture in America in the 70s, 80s. Like I joke, we'd be healthier if the cigarette companies went back to making cigarettes. Like, like, like, like, like, I think we were kind of a threat. You look at like, you look at like, you know, the videos from the 70s and the 60s, like Americans were good looking people. We were like, we were like really, really on point. I think we, I think our culture- Because everyone was smoking. They didn't have any time to eat.

I mean, I don't think smoking's great, but there was something better happening back there. We didn't have much lower rates of cancer. The Surgeon General Report was all about... I'm not endorsing smoking, but we got it all wrong. The Surgeon General Report came out on smoking to reduce cancer. I tweeted the graph recently. It's like 8x increase per capita in cancer in the United States. It's exploding. It's so hilarious. Yeah. Yeah.

What is a lower income families food and health education like now? Yeah, so we have a we have a I think I think it's the most criminal policy and kind of dynamic in America what we do poor people in this country and our Systems that feed and then Medicaid poor people is are completely co-opted. So let's look at a lower income family so 15% of

Americans, low-income Americans, are on SNAP, food stamps, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. We are the only country in the world where this nutrition program can go to sugary drinks. So 10% of SNAP, 10% of this program, which is the main source of nutrition for lower-income people, 15% of the country, goes to soda.

Um, so I do not think Coke should be banned. I think most drugs should be legal, right? I think that cigarettes should be legal, right? I enjoy, you know, beers, you know, and drinks, whatever, like it should all be legal, but we subsidize, we send $10 billion a year from the U S treasury to soda companies from food stamps and tell moms that are depending on that program that, you know, this is nutritious and

And with that, who tells the moms that it's nutritious? Well, the mom, a single mom working hard, low income would assume the supplement or nutrition assistance program could go to food. That's not going to poison her kid. There's no nutritional value from soda, right? Because you can spend. So I've,

Immigrant to this country, also massive idiot. Can you just explain what food stamps are? - Yeah, it's like a card that lower income folks get to help them buy food. - Like a credit card? - Yeah. - But it's only valid at certain stores? - For certain inventory. - For certain things. - And the inventory is dictated by the nutrition guidelines. And because the USDA nutrition guidelines

And this is all multifactorial, but the food stamp program goes by the USDA nutrition guidelines, okay? Which is like the main nutrition guidelines for the country that set the standards for a lot of other government programs. Working for the food industry, okay, so the nutrition guidelines are pretty important. Okay, let's get to the nutrition advisors. The 20 people that make nutrition guidelines are outside experts from Harvard and Tufts Nutrition School and Stanford, right?

19 of the 20 advisors on the US Nutrition Guidelines Committee are paid for by food and or pharma companies, processed food companies. So the nutrition guidelines today say that a two-year-old, that up to 10% of their diet can be added sugar, perfectly healthy. It also just released a report saying that ultra-processed food, there's no evidence that's bad for kids, and a child's diet can be 93% ultra-processed food and perfectly healthy. So if you're a mom,

and you're struggling to make ends meet, and you have a government program where your kid has a card and you have a card and you're shopping for your family, we are allowed to have an opinion on not poisoning the American people in this country. But because the science is rigged and these companies got to the scientists, the program for lower income people is subsidizing 10% soda and then 70% of food stamps, SNAP, goes to ultra processed food.

So, you know, it's just crazy rules. I was recently, we're partnering with the CEO and founders of Sweetgreen, which is a great company, you know, making healthy food, grass-fed steak, you know, fast. That's not available on food stamps, but McDonald's is. So you just have very, you have wild rules. - Calorie for calorie, you would be running behind with going to, I love me some food. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - I absolutely love it. But I wonder, I'm trying to play devil's advocate here, despite not eating much of this. - Right.

I'm trying to wonder about calorie density, ease of access to the food. You're a busy mom. Do you have time from scratch? It's, you know, the sweet potato and I'll get the potato peeler out and we'll throw those in with some organic olive oil or oregano can go in. You know, um,

I, the soda example is so perfect because it's so evidently pointless. Right, right. It has no satiety. Yeah. Yes. And when we, it's at the most empty calories that you're ever going to, I mean, you could even do it and say, this is available for soda, but only diet soda.

Yeah. You could even do that if you wanted to dial back the amount of calories. For sure, yeah. Yes. Yeah, the cheap calorie thing's interesting. And you know, you have folks, and we're trying to get Lane Norton, I have huge respect for him, he's super rigorous, I would never debate, you know, what the studies say with him. But I think there's, I'm kind of on the corruption level. And I think what the problem with ultra-processed food

you know, getting out of the calories, the calorie debate or anything with that, it's weaponized to make us want to eat more.

So when you subsidize ultra processed food for lower income Americans, the point of that food, the point of the food is to hijack our biology. So you cannot, if you ever overeat in steak or overeat in broccoli. - I'm carnivore, I'm not eating. - Yeah, you can't really overeat. Like I always say, there's not an obesity epidemic or diabetes epidemic among wild animals. Like we're born with under, you know,

unison with the food we're supposed to be eating to trigger our satiety. We can regulate ourselves quite nicely until it gets hacked. 100%. Ultra processed food deliberately from tobacco scientists is meant to hack our brains to be ultra palatable, to not produce satiety. So that's the criminal part. The cheap calories thing actually doesn't make quite so much sense. All well and good if you take

calorie per calorie compare how much it is for the sweet potato that someone's got to chop up versus how much it is for the hot pocket that somebody could throw in. Calorie for calorie, it may be cheaper for the hot pocket, but you're going to consume two, three times as many calories from that that are going to be free from a lower source that are going to be more highly processed. And then when you actually run the calorie for calorie allowance,

it's probably brought it back in line or maybe the sweet potato is now lower. So that's problem number one. Problem number two... How did I know that there was going to be a problem number two? So problem number two with subsidizing this ultra-processed food for kids and saying it's perfectly healthy is, and I think this is missed a little bit from the evidence-based community, and we can just use common sense and there's increasing evidence coming out, this cheap, dead,

hyper-processed food is absolutely causing issues to our cells and to our microbiome in ways we don't fully understand. Again, we're getting pounded over the head for more studies and that we're not being evidenced based on talking about the herbicides and pesticides on our food, right? Which is like,

sprayed over things. It's like, do we need to wait 10 years for a peer-reviewed study to say that spraying herbicides and pesticides all over children's food might be bad for their microbiome, which produces 95% of their serotonin, regulates almost every single hormone, and is completely under threat? So the cheap food, getting away from natural food, also inevitably is putting these... We have 10,000 chemicals...

that are allowed in our food in the United States. There's 400 in Europe. So it's actually, you have to prove harm. In Europe, you have to prove that they're good. Here, you have to prove it's automatic approval. Assumption of guilt or assumption of innocence. So there's a lot going on there with cheap, unnatural food, too.

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Eight months or so has been the worst for my health in my entire life. And a big chunk of that has been gut health related. Now, I know a number of friends who have got partners. Mark Manson's wife, I think, was born in Mexico. She came over here. A bunch of her other Mexican friends ended up getting into relationships or marrying Americans. Within two years, all of them have got SIBO and H. pylori overgrowth, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. And I

And I look at this laundry list of gut dysbiosis stuff that I've had to deal with this year that I'm still dealing with, with candida, with roundworm, with liver fluke, with fucking H. pylori, with SIBO, with all of this other stuff, which then turns into chronic inflammation. Then you're like, okay, well, maybe EBV is going to be kicked off. And then what about the environmental toxins? So on and so forth. And this...

two years ago, to me, would have been one of those, all right, Chris, you know, I can see that you've gone fully American now that you're even using the talking points about the food and stuff. I'm like, look, I'm a really good case study because I was a Petri dish that had never had digestive issues ever once in the UK. Not exactly. I mean, I'm a bro. My turnover of calories is very high. I eat at stupid times. I eat too much. I have lots of protein. I do eat processed food because I've got a sweet tooth. But even that, I have the same diet.

country to country. I just have a new country. So I have new constituent parts to my diet. So I understand that it might seem like I'm grilling you so far today. But the reason that I'm doing that, I think, is to hopefully try and have real firm proof to people who would have been as skeptical as I was. Meanwhile, the guy that would have been that person being super skeptical is sat here going, the last six months have just been a combination of low mood, brain fog, and going to bed at 8 p.m.

I mean, as you're talking, right, it's just like, how much more warning signs do we need to see? Like, I have a bunch of

Friends, women who joke they go to Europe for the summer and their boobs shrink. That's like a known thing. We have so much endocrine disrupting chemicals in our food that people experience dynamics like that when they go to Europe. In the United States, kids are hitting puberty years earlier than Europe. The puberty rate, the average puberty age where a woman hits puberty in the United States has gone down years.

in the past generation. So you think that there's some endocrine disruptors that are causing big titties in early puberty?

There's wild sexual dysfunction and hormone dysfunction happening to kids. I mean, look at what's happening to infertility. Like, there's demonstrably just chemicals in our food. And all you have to do is look, you know, at the testimony. Fani Hari, she goes by Food Babe on Instagram. She has the most powerful graphics I've ever seen, which just make the point so politically well and so succinctly. It just shows the foods well.

and the ingredients between the US and Europe. - I've seen these graphics before. This is the one that kicked off that Kellogg's thing with Canada, right? - Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they make, Kellogg's makes the Canadian version of Froot Loops in the United States.

And they make the Canadian version. And because these artificial dyes, which have no reason to be in foods, are petroleum-based, are highly linked to ADD and other neurological issues for kids demonstrably, are basically phased out of every single other developed country and developing countries, they color them with watermelon. They color them with carrot juice.

Here it's petroleum-based. So they make the different ingredients and then ship them –

across the border. So even getting, before we even get to, ultra-processed food is a shorthand for this weaponization. And I think we're not going to get there unless we really fundamentally not just look at micro-variables, but say, what are they doing differently in Europe? And Europe isn't perfect, but there's more respect for food. Can we talk about water?

Yeah. I mean, you go to the EWG database, Environmental Working Group, and you can type in your exact address and see what's in our water. I mean, I would just ask everyone to think about how competent the government is on various metrics and various services and then ask if you trust how they're making our water. I mean, it is an absolute...

It's an absolute disaster. And I think, you know, I think it's an urgent national paradigm. Our company, TruMed, you know, steers HSA dollars. We write medical notes for medical interventions that are root cause, that are science-backed.

And we are writing thousands of prescriptions for water filters because if you look at what's fueling ourselves, fueling our body, it's toxic food and toxic water. And I want to actually tie this water point back to what you asked about a single mom or a lower income mom being able to afford healthy food.

That's not the free market at work. The fact that it's hard for low-income people not to poison themselves is a total just abdication and moral blind spot of public policy. We spend $4.5 trillion on healthcare. There's nothing cheaper we could do for our budget in the United States than not poison our population.

That's causing dramatic economic dislocations. Human capital is being decimated. 33% of young adults are now pre-diabetic. If somebody's diabetic by the time they're 30, they're going to die 15 years earlier than a normal person. We are causing devastation to our human capital and business.

budget. The number one driver of problems, I would argue, in this country is that we're poisoning our population. So there's nothing cheaper that we could possibly do. And what our whole thrust is from a public policy standpoint is not look at, as Casey was told, as dietary interventions and food as these

and water as these kind of fringe issues. Like it's an urgent medical necessity with that $4.5 trillion we already spent on healthcare to get our water clean and to get toxins out of our food. That would just cure everything. It would be very disruptive though for the existing players in the system. - What contribution do you think there is when you look at air, when we're talking about environmental toxins,

You know, I drive through Austin and I see all of these new builds properties and you guys for some reason decide to build your houses made out of fucking timber and the timber is exposed to water when it rains, it's not covered over and then the water is wet and it's hot and it gets wet and hot and that means that it gets moldy and then you build a house around it and the skeleton of the house is imbued with mold and then the house gets cold and hot because of AC and because of heating and then air pollution...

There are lots of big heads to sort of chop off with regards to this. How big is the head of the more sort of airborne environmental toxins, that area of what we're discussing?

High level and drilling down to that. I would not trade living today for any other time. Modern society is amazing. But the large point we're trying to make, I think the point of this conversation is that there's a toxic stew we are living in, which is a result of our modern society and not being clear about the health benefits and how that's impacting ourselves.

And I think we've really, you know, gotten away from nature. When I think about all the environmental toxins in our air, I, you know, I think about how we've just disrespected crop cycles and have monocropping and how soil is, as I said, 70% less nutrient dense. So, you know, in our personal care products in our air, I think environmentalists have really done the world a disservice. It's not about like the specific measurement of carbon capture, like our environment is

is being poisoned. We're trying to out hack nature with the materials we use to build with our farming practices, with what we're putting in the air. Um, it's becoming unsustainable. Um, and, um, and I think, you know, what I would argue for, um, is realizing that

And then looking at the $4.5 trillion we spend and seeing ameliorating some of these dropbacks in modern society as part of the healthcare budget. It's not about over-regulation or having a nanny state, but it all gets to me of like, we just need clinical from the top, from the NIH, from the FDA. This is getting a little bit in the policy, but this is how my brain works.

We just need to have scientific reports on why these things are happening. Like everything right now, and I really mean everything, like the NIH, 90% of funding goes to researching pharmaceutical cures, accepting all of this poisoning of ourselves as a given. Like there's no government research happening to like these issues of our mold. I mean, that's still considered pseudoscience, right?

right about you know toxins in our building supplies about our personal care white blood cell count tries to disagree yeah yeah no and and i know people whose lives have been destroyed by mold i mean these things are all pseudoscience because you know again is it evil people

No, but the NIH has been totally co-opted and we're not studying these things. So to me, you know, we need to just know the truth. And if I could snap my fingers on one policy, one of the first things I'd do is steer the NIH and steer...

all federal research grants away from R&D for marginal cures, accepting, you know, basically throwing up our hands at the problem and really deep research on why we're getting sick. Because before we get into any policies about, you know,

banning or altering how homes are made, what's in our air. If you have a report for, this is what our enemies have learned. If you have a report saying sugar doesn't cause obesity or whatever it is, that's the highest level of trust. So we need to get conflicts out of that. And then I think that's upstream of all policy, but it's obvious that we have to get back to, this is the root cause.

I'd put food, I'd put the sedentary lifestyle of Americans higher probably. 70% of Americans aren't eligible to join the military because they're so sedentary. But right below that, the toxins in our air and water is a big deal. Getting into that, didn't some health body recently say that people were exercising too much? Yeah.

I mean, you can't make it up. You had a report funded by the USDA recently in the University of Michigan saying that it was dangerous to farm in your backyard. You've had Time Magazine saying exercise is an example of white supremacy. You had a recent article in a major publication saying it's right wing for people to be attractive.

and fit. You've had government guidance saying that it's dangerous. Yeah, there was government guidance saying it's dangerous for elderly Americans to be exercising too much that it might hurt their heart when really the, like as Peter Attia and others say that one of the chief causes of death is frailty of our muscles. Our muscles are a huge, important organ for our hormones.

and have to be preserved. So we're getting bizarre world advice. - But what are the, when it comes to that, so I understand there's incentives to sell food to people, there's incentives for the disease to keep going. This seems, especially the movement, the exercise, sedentary nature side, this seems more upstream. This seems even more, more, more upstream. You know what I mean? What's going on there? Who are the antagonists of exercise?

Well, okay. So let's just get out of the conspiracy, just go back to the framework. And we always got to go back to the framework. So what type of patient is profitable for the healthcare industry? A profitable patient is ingesting environmental toxins, is using poor hormone disrupting personal care products.

is eating ultra processed food is in fear and not questioning the medical system and they're sedentary. Like the most important, you know, one of the most, you know, powerful dynamics you can have, you know, to ensure that you're gonna live a more tortured life with more chronic diseases to be sedentary. So, you know, it's,

about in the book, exercise to me is kind of annoying. Like exercise, the fact that we have to do it is another result of our modern life. Like we didn't used to have gyms and used to be super thin. Like we have incentives for a super sedentary environment. But the fact that this hasn't been called out, that getting moving at least 180 minutes a week, getting your heart rate up is existential to disease prevention and reversal.

you know, is a blind spot in the medical system. I mean, I just go to the incentives. It's like, it's not a, you know, evil body thing

saying that we need to prevent Americans from exercising. But at Stanford Med School, it's seen as a fringe situation. I've talked to people at major insurers. Every insurer now has this exercise incentive. It's all window dressing. They're not actually paying out of insurance for gyms. And I've talked to insurance executives who say, yes, it is bad for us if people exercise because they're going to get healthier. So it's just like,

Are they being evil? No. Is our insurance companies incentivizing exercise? No. Like, like the healthcare system is not emphasizing this. And then of course it's in a small lifestyle budget. This is where, you know, Justin Mayers and I, uh, and our company, true med, this is like the entire point of our company is that, is that it's just not clinically accurate. Like, like, like,

It's a free country. People are going to make mistakes. People aren't all going to do the right thing. But if you have high cholesterol and the doctor across the table says you have a 70% chance of...

getting heart disease and dying on average of eight years younger and you're not going to be able to walk your daughter down the aisle unless you exercise for 180 minutes a week with some strength training. And here's a letter of medical necessity recommending this that allows you to use insurance money to propel that exercise regimen.

People will listen. There's this whole idea that people just shrug their shoulders and don't want to exercise. It's like, if that was the emphasis from Harvard Med School, from the NIH, from the FDA, if that was the clinical guidelines, if that was what was repeated, I look around, people listen to doctors. Most kids are vaxxed on the schedule, 72 shots.

People listen to the food pyramid, as I said. Our diet changed. People listened to the surgeon general. Smoking rates plummeted. Like, we listen to doctors. So I just think it's just clinically inaccurate that exercise is kind of seen as this fringe thing. And the fact that it is, is an example of the incentives.

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The problems and these dynamics at work. So let me just give a quick like and let's just think about this as like kind of a societal like example an example of the largest societal issue so

And it ties a lot of what we talked about together. So there is an epidemic, I'm going to go to kids, of childhood obesity. So 12 year olds, 50% are overweight or obese, unprecedented. Every parent with a kid can tell you they walk into a classroom, something wrong's happening.

That is not because of an ozempic deficiency, right? That, as we talked about, is that obesity epidemic is one branch on the tree that's also leading to the mental health crisis among children. 40% of high schoolers qualifies having a mental health disorder. You know, the diabetes, the cardiology issues, all the issues that kids are seeing all at once. This year in 2024 is the highest rate of heart disease, diabetes, obesity, autoimmune conditions, cancer, kidney disease,

and almost every other chronic condition among kids this year and adults. So the fact, so that's the problem. So let's just assess the problem, okay?

So we should be asking, what's the solution for that problem? The solution at some point in time needs to be that we need to reverse this metabolically destructive environment for adults and kids, that we need to start attacking the toxins, start attacking the food, start being bold and clear-headed about that and not just continue to drug the problem. We need to view...

the data and the science and realize that there's never been a chronic disease pharmaceutical treatment in American history that's lowered rates of the chronic disease that it's trying to treat.

Statins have led to more heart disease. Metformin has led to more diabetes. SSRIs have led to more depression. Increased rates of cancer drugs have led to more cancer. People can think about it and fact check in the comments. I cannot- You're not saying that that's causal. You're saying that these- I actually am saying it's causal because it's a moral hazard. The fact that when a kid has high cholesterol, they're told-

You're doing something. You're taking action. You're reversing this with the statin. The American Diabetes Association, until 2018, when they were shamed on this, advised that if you took diabetes medication, you could eat whatever you want. They said that, the American Diabetes Association. They still, the American Diabetes Association still doesn't definitively link sugar consumption to diabetes.

So, no, I think it's very causal. I think the fact that we have been lied to in the past 40 years and that it's not like this is a small... The statins, right, for the past 30 years, it's not...

this is like something, but you need to really rigorously work on your lifestyle habits. It's like my uncle was on the stand. Oh, I'm getting my burger. And it's like, it's literally sold as a tool and Ozempic sold as a tool. Ozempic's not being paired with lifestyle interventions. It's being paired as the magic cure. You can get Ozempic right now in a couple of clicks online. This is a lie to say this is- Ems has got their own version, et cetera, et cetera. So I think it's very causal. And I think this, this, this,

road of seeing every one of those micro issues, even one of those branches as a siloed condition and then, you know, drugging it with a very incremental pill has been

A failure. So Ozempic is the greatest example so far of this, where it's, if somebody's 300 pounds, extremely diabetic, talk to your doctor about that. I'm concerned about the median child. I'm concerned about what to do and the median adult. I thought the median child was obese.

Exactly. I'm concerned about that median child. Not the morbidly obese, diabetic, elderly person, but the average child in this country. Is Ozempic the correct intervention for them? Because that's what's being argued. And weeks ago, I went to Congress. I met with 40 members of Congress. I sat across from the person who introduced a bill to cover Ozempic on Medicare.

That is $1,600 per American per month. Medicare is for elderly Americans, so 80% of Medicare patients are eligible for Ozempic. This bill, the second it's signed, will open up a floodgate where any single person that's eligible, 80% of people overweight or obese on Medicare, can get this on HIMSS with one click and get it government funded. Okay?

The second a drug is approved for Medicare, this is why Novo Nordic is arguing so well much for the bill, it goes to Medicaid. Because why would old people be entitled to a drug but not poor people?

This is a game. So the bill puts it on Medicare because these old people need their Ozempic, and then it immediately goes to Medicaid. And then on Medicaid, they're pushing it on six-year-olds. The American Academy of Pediatrics, as I mentioned, that's saying it's good for 12-year-olds, they're now doing research on six-years-old because if the drug works for adults, why not for kids? So- Given the downstream from obesity and metabolic dysfunction, there are lots of problems. If Ozempic comes in and reduces those problems, would that not be a net positive? Yeah.

is not the correct societal intervention for obesity. If just let's use common sense and we're getting divorced from our common sense, I think with the Olympic debate, if we start jabbing the majority of Americans with a lifetime injection that causes so much gut dysfunction, our body tricks itself into not eating. It's liquefied anorexia. It's a liquid crash diet. And those people are continuing to be sedentary and continuing to eat ultra processed crap.

Are we going to see reduced comorbidities and improved health over the next 30 years? That's an interesting question. I guess it depends on how much weight

that contributes to most of the problems downstream? I mean, you dig into the drug itself, there's huge problems. The drug causes so many side effects that 50% of people that have insurance for it go off of it within six months. Really? So the drug is gut dysfunction, right? Our gut is connected to the rest of our body, right? You've seen this. You've talked about this. The drug tricks our gut into not wanting to eat. It's like jamming GLP-1, which is

which our body produces to, to accuse satiety, it's jamming like thousands and thousands of times more than we're normally made to. And it, so, so, so, so it's been approved for kids based on a 64 week study. It's a lifetime injection. You've got all these different comorbidities and side effects. I,

I've said this, people can fact check me, by my count, Ozempic actually is the most pronounced side effects of any mass drug ever approved in American history. More than 50% of people have to stop using it due to vomiting, due to intense gastrointestinal issues.

There's a black box warning for thyroid cancer, which I can tell you it's very hard to get a black box warning. The FDA is totally co-opted by pharma, and that's a very, very serious warning. So if that's already on there, there's a, it's the iceberg of other- You're very skeptical of these GLP-1s and what's going to come next.

like Tezapatide, Retributide, all of the other... It's a free country. I think they should be available. But it is absolutely criminal and makes no sense that the largest company and most valuable company in Europe is a Denmark company

that's projecting 90% of their profits from the United States for a drug that is not the standard of care in Europe and through a rigged system, through a system they've rigged in the United States, is 10 times less expensive in Europe. So they have rigged our system and are now the most... They passed LVMH. They passed the fashion giant. They are the most valuable company in Europe based on assuming $1,600 per month from Americans, from the taxpayer, to jab...

this shot into the average American's arm when I can't go to a playground without seeing soda bottles and ultra-processed food that's subsidized by the government to get people fat in the first place. This is dark. So the reason that I was particularly interested to find out your thoughts when it comes to a Zen pick is that, you know this, if the dream world that you have, which is also the one that I want for America and for the family that I hope to raise here,

return to Whole Foods, removal of all of the 10,000 down to an acceptable number of things that can preservatives that can be in foods and stuff like that. There is going to be a very messy middle and between incentives, conceptual inertia, understanding, availability, what's in your local Target, what's in your local Walmart, what's available, all of this stuff, it is going to take time to reverse this behemoth.

My total bro science theory was, well, maybe Ozempic is an artificial solution to an artificial problem, but that if it offers an opportunity to have a metabolic intervention when it comes to the amount of calories that are being consumed, and given that being obese and overweight is such a huge problem,

I wondered whether it would be an interesting stopgap between now while the Kallies and the Kaseys of the world can get in, try to change the more systemic stuff, and then we come out the other side and it's less needed. I hate to do this again, but I got to dispute the premise of the question about this taking a long time. So let's just look at why I am so passionate about this Ozimbic thing.

It's $1,600 per person per month. What could you do with $1,600? What if you had $1,600 for Obese American and asked, how do we- Just because the American isn't paying for it out of their pocket, it's the insurance, doesn't mean that the money isn't coming from somewhere.

Of course. This is on track to cost the US taxpayer with one stroke of a pen, trillions of dollars. Wow. So when are we going to, that's the problem. I don't care if compounding pharmacy, you know, people, you know, I think the price of it is an absolute scandal and needs to be attacked. It's not the free market that we pay 10 times more from Germany. Have you looked at what the production price of it is?

How much it costs to make? $3. Yeah. No, it's true. And then it's like, well, you're going to harm pharma innovation. It's like, we can deal with less pharma innovation on chronic disease management. I don't see... But let's get out of any price controls. The US, it's not ideological. This is not a partisan issue.

The US is the largest buyer of drugs in the world can have an opinion on not paying 10 times more than Germany. If I were to put one policy down on the price, it's you can charge whatever you want, but we're not paying more than Germans or the Scandinavians. Because right now we're paying 10 times more for this drug. They are laughing at us in Norway. They are sitting there drinking their lattes, riding their bikes and laughing at us right now. Okay. Okay.

So I do want everyone to maybe have some optimism. And I think what you're saying- It's been a very cataclysmic conversation. No, no, no, no, no. This is optimistic. This is optimistic. Because I think what you're saying- We might have different definitions of optimism. Knowledge is power. And this is important.

What you're saying, I think you're absolutely putting what everyone says is that this takes a while. But $1,600 per person, you can change, you've probably seen this, right? You can change your biomarkers very quickly. If you go on an elimination diet or have curiosity with your food, what if every single obese child, right, that that doctor talked about already,

our food system and talked to that child about how they start pursuing a life of curiosity about their food and putting whole foods in their body and the miracle and spiritual power of food to heal ourselves and putting live food in our bodies and whole foods. And that with one fourth of that $1,600, with a couple hundred extra dollars a month, we're

We're going to help that mom afford whole food for her family. So I don't disagree, but the problem there is you can't snap your fingers and get doctors that have been indoctrinated for so long. The conceptual inertia, the momentum that they're having in one direction, are you going to be able to change that?

the incentives, what the doctors expect to do when they get into a conversation, what they've been trained to do, what they've been told to do, what their colleagues do, the peers, et cetera, et cetera. It's an existential issue, Chris. I mean, we are- I don't disagree, but I think we need to be realistic. We're going to have mass societal collapse with what's happened to our health

within the next couple of years, I think. I think we're gonna have mass food crises with what's happening to our soil. I think we're gonna have destabilizing. We are becoming infertile as a species. Like infertility is going up 1% a year. We are becoming a non-competitive. We're gonna go bankrupt. We are gonna have 40% of our GDP managing chronic disease in the next 10 to 15 years. We're gonna have like societal collapse.

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You mentioned the fertility thing earlier on. Birth rate decline has been something I've been super focused on for a very long time. This is the bit that I need you to explain to me, which is why would any business which intends on continuing to achieve profits reduce the size of its market? Well, I mean,

You just have to look at the incentives of the healthcare industry, which is the infertility crisis is a byproduct of what's happening to overall health. It's another branch of the tree. Let me give you... They know that if they, in one generation, two generations, three generations time, that the number of people that they're dealing with is dropping.

That's the optimistic part of the story. We will either cease to exist as a species. The American experiment will fall because we let ourselves get fatter, sicker, more depressed, more infertile at an increasing rate while bankrupting the country, or we'll change this. The system right now is unsustainable and it's short-term focused, right? The problem is we have totally lost sight of our cycles of nature and our own bodies. And we've put short-term profit ahead of the long-term. Like industrial agriculture is maybe good in the short term, but it's destroying our soil and how we're

pillorying our bodies with pharmaceutical interventions is good in the short term, but it's leading us to become infertile. Let's just go into infertility specifically. And I cannot stress this enough to any woman watching. Most women I know of childbearing age are dealing with PCOS, which is polycystic ovarian syndrome, which is the leading cause of infertility.

I've never met a woman who's gone to a traditional OBGYN who's been diagnosed with PCOS who has not immediately gotten a prescription for hormone pills to ram down her throat and on the road to IVF. Just as an economic fact, IVF is a super profitable invention, right? It's an invasive procedure that costs a lot of money and it's like a pretty inelastic demand curve because people want to have a baby. So it's a great thing.

No OBGYNs talk about why people are getting PCOS. And PCOS, as my sister eloquently talks about and can talk about with much more knowledge than me, is on the spectrum of insulin resistance. It's basically a warning sign that our body, that we're having metabolic dysfunction in our body. That's criminal for two reasons that's not mentioned. One is that in Denmark, IVF should be illegal, of course, and should be encouraged if needed. But it's three steps in Europe.

First, they educate the woman about the metabolic ties to the PCOS and do a government-subsidized keto diet, which is the most effective intervention ever studied to reverse the symptoms of PCOS and increase fertility leading on the road. The second problem is that it's actually a warning sign of underlying metabolic dysfunction in the mom. It's maybe one of her first times. I go back to my mom, which is really our inspiration, who died recently of pancreatic cancer, and

We were so indignant about that because the doctors at Stanford said it was unlucky when she had 40 years of symptoms. One of her very first symptoms was gestational diabetes with me, and then I was born at 12 pounds, which she got high fives for, but a large baby is actually a sign that there's metabolic dysfunction in the mother. So with these fertility issues, it's often the woman's first sign that they've got some branches on that tree growing, and instead of jamming hormone pills and invasive surgeries, she

It can actually be an opportunity to start that woman on a path of realizing that unless she understands what's happening with her cells not producing energy efficiently, which is what PCOS is, you know, she's going to be having more issues along her way. It's an important milestone point to begin an intervention. It's a very stark milestone.

flag in the ground. It's the wrong clinical thing to just get them straight into jamming hormone pills down their throat. And it's also missing the warning sign, which again is profitable. One of my best friends, and he actually talks about PCOS now and the causes, and he's a great guy from Harvard Med School, but he did not learn at Harvard Med School and residency at Mass General for OBGYN. Not once.

I'm not joking. Doctors, OBGYNs graduate from Harvard without understanding what PCOS actually is. They just know how to cut someone open and do IVF. Can we get into the sort of regulatory body side of this? Who's being bought off? How it works? The sort of like commercial nepotism type thing that's going on. Yeah. And I think this gets a little bit, I hear you. I mean, there's the super entrenched, but like

Gosh, I might be new to this and too idealistic, but seeing President Trump talk about these issues with RFK, you never expected President Trump at a rally to be talking about regenerative farming and the poisoning of our food supply. Whatever you think of him. The guy that said that there was only so many heartbeats that you have per lifetime. So exercise. Things are changing quickly. And here's why I'm optimistic. So there will be a radical change, 100%.

But I do think most doctors are good people, quite frankly, as you said. They're all getting in this for the right reasons. And what can we do to change this? It's attacking the regulatory agencies. So let's just go down one by one of these agencies that have a profound impact on our health.

I'm just going to go through. The FDA is 75% funded by pharma. And importantly, for drugs, it's not FDA bureaucrats often. It's outside advisory panels who don't have conflicts of interest. So when I was working for the pharmaceutical industry about 12 years ago, the opioids were all the rage. And we helped put together a panel at the NIH of Opioid Guideline Committee.

And we appointed the Dean of Stanford Med School, I mentioned Philip Pizzo, to that and he chose 18 others. Philip Pizzo was a pain specialist

And he had received direct bribes, direct bribes that I helped organize from opioid manufacturers. He was the president of like the pain council, whatever the industry group where he got an honorarium. And then he received millions of dollars of research grants. And right before he was appointed, opioid companies gave Stanford Med School $4 million of research grants to revise their curriculum. Okay, unbiased.

So he was just demonstrably paid off. And then 11 of the 19 members of the opioid committee at the NIH were

paid for by opioid makers. And they released a report in 2011 saying that the addiction concerns were overblown and that pain is a crisis in this country and that it would be criminal not to attack pain with vigor. And the graphs of opioid prescriptions went up and now we know about the opioid crisis and talk about that today. The majority of opioid overdoses on fentanyl and things like that today

started that addiction from a legal prescription. I just give that as an example. That's what's happening with those Zympic. That's what's happening with every other drug. The FDA advisory committees are outside experts who are almost always conflicted. There's no conflicts of interest. And then the FDA itself, as I keep mentioning, funded by pharma. Why is pharma aggressively lobbying to fund the agency that it regulates? Because

Agencies in DC are built to grow. And if they grow by the pharma industry growing, that dictates their incentives, right? And then of course you have the revolving door where the second somebody's the head of the FDA, they immediately go to the board of Pfizer every single time. So there's very simple things you can do.

to not have the FDA funded by pharma, to not have advisory committees of people that are funded by the drug companies that they're approving, to disaggregate food and drug, FDA. Why is the food regulatory body paid for by the drugs?

which profit from people getting sick from food. No other European country has that. The food regulatory body is separate. These are executive orders we're making that you can do right away. And then you talk about things changing. If the FDA follows the science and has the correct standard of care guidelines,

You know, that PCOS is tied to insulin resistance in food. That potentially, the first step, that diabetes might be tied to sugar and that dietary interventions might be right for diabetes. Again, it's what we're doing with our company, TruMed. It's like... Can you explain what TruMed is for everyone? Because I think it's a really cool idea. Let me start wider to every person watching. When you are getting from your doctor a prescription for a chronic disease medication, you know, for all the conditions we're talking about,

You can ask them for a letter of medical necessity. They can take out a pad and write about how food could help reverse PCOS, about how exercise is a more effective treatment than an SSRI for depression. Clinically accurate information, right? It's not woo-woo stuff. It's like almost heart disease. A dietary and exercise intervention for high cholesterol, much better than a drug. They can write that in a note.

So my – TruMed, our company, is a issue advocacy organization. Whether you use TruMed or not, everyone should know that. And when you have that note, right now you can do HSA, FSA dollars. So you can pay for your gym membership. You can pay for your Momentus. You can pay for your Element hydration. You can pay for items that are clinically –

Yeah, with 8sleep. So we proudly do a large portion of 8sleep sales right now. 8sleep changed my life. You want to put better sleep, 20% better sleep up against these drugs with sleep's impact on all these chronic conditions, right? These products, we know many of these entrepreneurs. I'm inspired by these entrepreneurs and they are frontline medicine. It's nothing short of a moral blind spot.

And I know you take good sponsors. Many of your sponsors we're working with, they're on the front lines of medicine. Why is all the $4.5 trillion going to these pills? So what we did with TruMed is we read the law. And despite pharma's best efforts, the definition of medicine is not a synthetic pill made by Pfizer. The definition of medicine is what a doctor deems appropriate for the cure, mitigation, or prevention or reversal of a condition.

And we use clinical guidelines to, you know, use research, use common sense, and connect quickly through a telehealth, the same one that HIMSS use and the same process that these drug dispensaries use, to assess third party and make a recommendation and a letter of medical necessity for root cause items based on the condition the patient has. Now, I want to be really clear. Like, we started this company because we think that is the biggest idea in medicine. Like, what if...

This is just HSA's FSA's, which is 150 billion, which is a sizable part.

And every American, every person watching should know that you should max out your HSA if you're battling to prevent or reverse a chronic condition. And you can qualify to have your money go to supplements, to H-Sleep, to Peloton, to Athletic Greens, to Momentous, to what I believe are life-saving clinical interventions. I'm making that statement, not them. You're valid for that. But that needs to be the $4.5 trillion.

The policy solution that can change the world quickly is to get the clinical guidelines right, where we finally understand that heart disease is not a statin deficiency, which is what the guidelines are. I'm not joking. Like the guidelines and the standard of care when an American is on insurance or on a government program like Medicaid, it's to prescribe them a drug. There's no discussion of sleep. There's no incentives for sleep.

So if we have the right clinical guidelines, which I think can be a one-year sprint that RFK is talking about that's totally bipartisan to get corruption out of clinical guidelines, and then open up more programs to flexibility, you're not lecturing someone what to eat, but you, right, on your journey,

you're totally outside the system now with all your gut health. What if you could actually, you know, use some of this $4.5 trillion, all this money you're paying in insurance, what if that could actually go to more holistic and blood testing and all the things you're like, like that's a world that could exist and would be much cheaper. You know, the crazy thing is, so, uh,

only until recently did I didn't have a doctor while I was in the US for the first year and a half. It's like people talk about my doctor. I spoke to my doctor. Like, what's that mean? I don't have like a doctor in the UK. It's like a GP practice. I drop in and whoever's available, you go and see.

I brought a British mentality to an American healthcare system. And I also didn't have medical insurance. I still don't. So I've been going through this. I had to buy ivermectin. I'm fully Joe Rogan-pilled at the moment. But for three days up until yesterday, I was taking an antiparasitic. It was $350 per tablet.

And I was like, you know, nobody has ever, apparently, I turned up at CVS and the lady was,

I made a face. She says, like, who's the provider or whatever they ask. And I went, sort of held up my credit card and she just gave this face to me. Evidently, this is very rare that somebody goes in and just pays cash. Stupid enough to not have sorted healthcare insurance after two and a half years of being here. I am on with it. But to see the price, a single pill. I mean, I've paid a lot of money for pills in my life, but 350 bucks is a PB. Yeah.

You wouldn't believe it. So it's just crazy when you get into the rabbit hole here. So you take Ozimbic, that's $1,600 and how I say that government's going to pay $1,600 for it. So they actually issue coupons to Americans. So you probably hear friends, they're getting it for like $700. Okay, great. That's a compounded version. Yeah, no, no, or just brand name. So they're issuing more and more coupons. They do this for a lot of drugs for people that are paying out of pocket that don't have insurance.

But they've made in the laws, there's five lobbyists for every single member of Congress for pharma. The law is that Medicare and Medicaid, the biggest spenders in the world on drugs, the big US government programs, can't use the coupon price. So they actually put the, they have to pay the full price. So the US taxpayer by law has to pay the full price. And then you could probably find more coupons where people paying out of pocket get a coupon, but the taxpayer is actually paying that $350. Right.

They totally rigged the system. I mean, it's beyond even comprehension how these systems are rigged. You mentioned RFK, you mentioned Trump. You've been sidelines and then frontline. I think you're one of the first words out of RFK's mouth when he said that he was joining, backing Trump. What have you learned since being behind the scenes in political parties that are on the come up about what's going on at the moment? I'll be super direct, and this is what I'm saying.

It is true desire to help kids. My sister and I have been on this mission really since our mom died, really propelled this, writing the book, trying to put good energy out there. Have gotten to know Democrats, have gotten to know the Trump campaign, have gotten to know RFK through podcasts, through connecting with these folks, trying to help all sides however we can. I felt a deep spiritual calling, honestly, watching President Trump with the first assassination attempt, you know,

I think all of us felt something as Americans seeing that happen, seeing a bullet hit a former president's body. I was with my wife. I felt the need to just call RFK and I'm like, this might be a time for unity. You've built this incredible community talking about these issues that we're talking about, talking about how it could change fast. Potentially, it's worth talking about

unity. And he ended up, you know, he's thinking about the same thing. And I helped with Tucker Carlson connect them that night. And to answer your question, just from my small vantage point, kind of watching the conversations develop, there wasn't one word of

of the polling. There wasn't one word of like, you know, the special interests. It was like tears. Like they were like, there were like tear filled conversations about why so many kids in the United States are obese and diabetic and discussion of this being a legacy item. I I've been meeting with anyone who will meet. I met with, with Nancy Pelosi two weeks ago, uh, behind closed doors. How'd that go?

These are human beings that care and do not want kids to be devastated in the United States. I think a huge problem is the staffers slithering behind the members of Congress who are making the policy and working on getting a job at their next boss, the pharmaceutical insurance industry. So if I'm ever in a position of power, I will only try to meet with the members themselves because at a human level, of course, nobody is behind closed doors.

really cognitively thinking. I talked about meeting with the person who introduced the Ozempic bill. Nice person. Nice person. He is paid millions of dollars by the pharmaceutical industry. They came into his office. They asked him to introduce this bill, this bill that has trillions of dollars in implications. And I informed him that that bill is going to get to kids. And he said, no, no, no, this isn't being pushed on kids. I'm like, well, that's against the FDA.

this bill is going to be a lifetime drug and really cost the US taxpayers a lot of money. No, no, no, no, no. It's not a lifetime drug. It's a quick fix. No, you're going into the FDA. It just literally says you should never go out the drug. He literally didn't know. And then I brought up the idea of what if that $1,600 goes to food?

I'm not joking. The thought hadn't occurred. Like, like, like it wasn't like, it wasn't like this evil forces. It's like literally these ideas have not occurred to people. So yeah, I mean, we'll see where the rubber hits the road, but you talk about fast change and,

Everyone talks about President Trump eating unhealthy food, all that stuff. He has absolutely staked his political life on taking out corruption. And what RFK, I think, has really articulated well is this is that what's happening to our health is the greatest example of these forces that are against the American people, which Trump does stand for.

And I think a lot of these issues about distrusting pharmaceutical companies and being more holistic are issues of the left. I think truly there's an opportunity for bold bipartisan action here because nobody wants what's happening. What have you got from the Democrat side when it comes to these discussions? Have you been able to make much headway there? I think there's an opportunity for bold bipartisan action next year. I think, I think, I'll say this.

This issue requires strong executive leadership. Like, like, like members on the left and the right say, we have to have air cover from the president talking about this. This has to be a core issue. Like what pharma is able to do is like, they slip these things in and without high level awareness, they're

It kind of just keeps getting corrupt. For instance, the bill that lets the FDA be funded by pharma just kind of slid under the rug a couple years ago. But when Trump talks about that at a rally, everyone cheers. So what they're actually begging for is a president who focuses on this issue. And that then allows a member of Congress when the pharma lobbyist is coming in to

to say, "Oh, wish I could do something for you, but I'm gonna get killed by the president. This is gonna be vetoed." Right now, without top-down executive focus, the corruption's able to worm. So I hate that healthcare

is becoming political. But I do think we're coming up on an existential moment in the next 40 days with this election. And I think this is the most important issue, these broken incentives of our healthcare industry, and it requires strong executive leadership. What happens if we don't fix this over the next five to 20 years? Five to 50 years? I mean...

I think the data is clear we have on the current trajectory for our farming system, 30 to 40 crop cycles left and our soil is going to be dust. We're getting more diabetic, fatter. It honestly can't go much higher. It's 80%, as I mentioned, overweight or obese. 66% of adults have some form of prediabetes or diabetes. I mean, we're, I think, driving to a destabilizing societal event where this is going to eat up our...

budget bankrupt our country and form a non-competitive country. This is pronounced... This is demonstrably worse than the United States. We always say we are shipping our diet around the world and it's getting worse around the world. But seven-year life expectancy gap between Japan that's growing while we spend four times more per capita on healthcare than them, it's an unsustainable situation. So

I really worry about a food crisis with how much we're trying to hack our natural cycles of agriculture and environment. I worry about destabilizing events with infertility that's skyrocketing. I worry about crises in America of competitiveness with human capital.

Viewers can make their own decision, but I think this dynamic where our largest industry and fastest growing industry is profiting from us being sick is a existential threat to the country. If I'm really to think from first principles on what will end the American experiment, it's not going to be the wrong marginal tax rate.

It's not going to be the wrong percentage of military spending. It's not these fake social justice, DEI issues that we're debating from the media. It's going to either be from nuclear Armageddon or the fact that we're getting so sick and infertile and depressed. And I think we have to put those two issues above all else, preventing nuclear war and our health. What ways might you be wrong? Where is your case? Yeah.

Well, I think you've got people I really respect kind of in the entrepreneurial community and VC community like Elon Musk and like folks like that, Marc Andreessen, who think we're on the dawn of just radical innovation on pharmaceutical solutions. You know, I just seen today on Twitter, those folks are heralding new cancer vaccines and AI-driven therapeutics and personalized therapeutics to people

you know, ramp up life expectancy. That some of these drugs, you know, might even, you know, help kickstart things like Ozempic, you know, this idea which is totally not supported by any data, but like, you know, it's, there's no data that people go on crash diets and then that kickstarts better lifelong habits, but there's arguments around that. But, but I think, I, I think, I think there is an argument that this dawn of tremendous innovation that we're seeing

can kind of outrun the trends we're seeing to our metabolic health. And that we're at an age of tremendous personalized pharmaceutical innovation that's going to extend longevity and out hack chronic disease. So it's kind of like the unknown unknowns at the moment. I guess it's interesting. I feel

and this isn't meant as an insult, there is a degree of similarity between some of the more aggressive proponents behind the climate debate and some of the sort of talking point. Mostly that this is a big problem, it's happening now, and we need to be important about it. The thing that's interesting, I think that also maybe relates to the climate debate, is there are maybe some

interventions that can't be foreseen. Stuff that can be pumped into the atmosphere, which is able to reflect light up at a very, very high level, that's able to reduce greenhouse gases, ways that AI can step in and do these sorts of different things. I wonder whether

You know, we are yet to see the promises, and I'm similar to you, kind of, I guess, hopeful, but uncertain and skeptical about, well, what is this actually going to be able to achieve? Are we going to have complete, not difference of degree, difference of kind technologies? Right.

because I haven't seen anything yet. Well, I would actually... The analogy I would draw is that the climate alarmists are actually, in an analogy, likened to who I'm against. They're likened to more of the pharmaceutical industrial complex. The climate industrial complex, to me,

is like the pharmaceutical industrial complex. I mean, the same people arguing for both things. Like Bill Gates right now, he just said today that we need government funded AI bots to immediately remove any anti-vaccine information from the internet immediately. Because the second any critical information about vaccines or other pharmaceutical products that the science supports get out even a day, that that creates brain viruses for people questioning things. He literally just said this.

And he's also saying that it's completely anti-science to suggest that trees help with carbon and we need to spray and block the sunlight. So what comes to mind? The only analogy or the only similarity that I saw between yourself and the people from the climate is big problem, happening soon, need to make a difference with it, and there's maybe some technology that can fix it. That was the beginning and the end of you and the people who spray things orange. Thank you. And I think...

The climate thing is really – because I've thought about it. That's not my issue. I think the environment is an existential issue. I'd like to think the health issue that what I'm talking about resonates with people on a personal level because I think we're all feeling either with ourselves, with our kids, with our parents who are getting sicker. It's just like there's something just not right. And I think what RFK is doing, what I'm trying to do, what my sister is trying to do is really paint like the incentives.

so that it can be a path to empowerment and questioning. And that's what this is really all about. It's being on a bottoms up mission to like take matters into our own hands on why we're getting chronic conditions like you're doing with your elimination diet and talking about your gut. So, yeah. And I think, honestly, like...

We're thinking about the climate debate. To me, I think that's a big power grab. But I think, like we're talking about, what's happening to our environment is super, super related to this health thing. I mean, the raping of our air and our water and our soil. I'm a capitalist, but I don't think this is a free market. I think it's really we've been co-opted by short-term interest and corporate capture. And I think

we could actually come together with the environmental community here and frame a real bold health and environment agenda through a selfish lens of not damaging ourselves. Well, I think, you know, ultimately what much of the climate movement is trying to achieve is a world where humans can flourish in future balanced with the rest of nature, that's plants and animals.

Right now, humans aren't flourishing that much. There are interventions that can occur. Forget how we're going to be your grandchildren's grandchildren's grandchildren. It's going to be too hot and they're going to have to move away from Miami because the water's going to have risen. It's like,

Right now, they're miserable and addicted to drugs and eating shit food and all fat and all on SSRIs and all dying too soon. Right now. So yeah, it does surprise me. It kind of shows, I guess, the myopia of single issue obsessives. Right. It's super, I mean, it's a core point of what everything we're trying to say is it's all interconnected. And I think it's almost like, to me, this is what we're talking about is a world of abundance. Like, like,

I have some conversations with the techie folks who are trying to kind of out-vaccine and, in my opinion, kind of out-engineer this cascading chronic disease crisis. To me, it's not about not having technology. It's about where that technology should be going. Like, to me, societally...

technology and innovation and AI needs to be going to realizing that we've gotten a little ahead of our skis here and kind of forgotten our, that like really awe of what's going on inside our body and natural cycles in the environment of like farming and natural cycles of our body, you know, giving all women hormone disrupting pills and thinking that's fine and telling them that's fine. Like we've kind of like out hacked cycles and, um,

It's not about being a Luddite and not having any technology. It's about having the humility to say we should realize the situation for what it is. We've gotten away from our natural cycles. We shouldn't be necessarily investing in ways to out-hack that more, but investing in technology to get back to basics. So one example, what I'd love to see, and I think there's real opportunity, is regenerative farming. So we talked about this a lot. You've talked about this, right? It's getting back to more natural farming practices. So it's very clear that with regenerative farming, you actually produce more

crops per acre and it's much better for the environment. The problem is that because everything's kind of in one big shit show and it's not lined up like industrial agriculture, there's more labor. So I think with like robotic technology and some investment in that, you could actually lower the labor costs to where we could shift to a regenerative system. Like if there was a focus on that-

from private, maybe even public sources. We could transform farmland, it takes a couple of years, to regenerative. The only variable preventing that is the labor costs. And that is a better system for farmers, for everyone. So I don't- That interesting blend of sort of new technology with existing balance for the environment. Yeah, and I don't think it's necessarily just either top-down policies needed. I think fundamentally with-

with TruMed, with my sister's company Levels, I think the real defining economic break for me when you're doing a healthcare company is do you believe that the current system is unsustainable? The current system of our monocropping, of waiting for people to get sick and then drugging them, it's not just morally problematic. It actually has to stop because costs are increasing at an increasing rate while we're getting sicker. So from a venture capital, like my pitch to a lot of like

and thought leaders in the health space is they still see HIMS, you know, putting a millennial pink packaging on drugs as innovation, better UX for medical records. Anything that's putting a better wrapper on the existing broken system without addressing the incentives of the system is more of the same. It's putting a better wrapper over like a shit sandwich. Like,

We need to fundamentally ask with every single healthcare idea, is this disrupting the current incentives or is this propping up the current incentives? And to me, that's not, again, it's not just like this like moral thing. It's like, if our system's unsustainable, we have to be investing like 10 years down the road

on technologies that get back to a situation that respects the environment more, that respects our air, our water, our food more. I think there's just no other mathematical road in my head of how we survive as a country in the next 10, 15 years where we respect our farming practices more, where we demedicalize all these chronic conditions that are fundamentally not like medical issues. So...

That's what I would hope to see with the technology. I mean, if we could have robots in the next five years that dramatically change the curve of labor for regenerative farming and work to shift everyone over. Those are policies I think, like, to me, it's unimpeachable on the corruption, getting corruption out of the scientific guidelines, which will lead to a lot of downstream impacts and then opening up healthcare flexibility.

If I'm creating a staggered, prioritized plan of true policy change, I think that's something that does require time, does require deep conversations with farmers. But I think there's got to be a deep, important conversation with the agriculture community about how we unwind these broken incentives that are leading to ultra-processed food and get to a more regenerative future.

You haven't given exactly a glowing report of what most health information is when it comes to accuracy. And then even when you're talking about evidence-based or scientific, there are also incentives that you say don't even lead those to be representative of what it is that people should know. Given that, a lot of people will think, all right, Callie, that sounds great. Where do I go for my health information? Where do you go for your health information?

So my sister was being indoctrinated at Stanford Medical School and then in residency. And someone gave her a book by Mark Hyman.

who's been, you know, for 20 years has been kind of unpacking these issues. She read that book and read more books, read books by Rob Lustig, by a lot of people you have on the podcast, other folks. Started going, you know, agreed with some stuff, disagree with other, but it started radicalizing her. And she gave me some of those books. So as I, as she left the system in 2017, I called her an idiot. I said, you know, you're ruining your future. What are you doing? So she started giving me some of those books.

And then I started listening to podcasts. And during COVID, you know, I heard that Joe Rogan was enemy number one and that he was spreading dangerous misinformation. And I'd turn on a random episode and he was talking about looking at the sun, exercising, eating healthy. And I started listening to various medical experts and yours. I mean, I'm not blowing smoke up your ass here or saying this because I'm here. Like what is happening with independent media? Yeah.

is one of the biggest societally shifting events in history. Like when you look at history, it's often how we're getting information. You know, the Time Magazine said the printing press was the most important historical moment in history. Like Ben Franklin publishing, you know, all the pamphlets and Federalist papers. Like I think this shift, this like hundred year shift

to where we don't have corporate controlled information sources is like really important and so I think podcasts are a Massive passive part of this. I think it's why there's such violence of criticizing what's happening I think it's why the Atlantic and other mainstream publications just pillory us for going to the Senate and talking for four hours about metabolic health but to me when I think it's such an interesting example of the free market because

you have no curiosity about childhood diabetes, obesity, pharmaceutical corruption on the mainstream media, but it's kind of all people are talking about on independent and, you know, a small data point, but like, I'm blown away. Like the book, you know, the book's selling really well. Outlive was by Peter Tia was the top selling book of the last couple of years. It's like,

It's like people are desperate for this information. I was just stopped on the street from somebody seeing the podcast on Tucker. Tucker Carlson said his interview with my sister was one of the most eye-opening things he's done in 33 years and is now evangelizing this idea of metabolic health. I think once you get the brain worm in you, it's kind of hard to unsee. And it's actually where you talk about things changing quickly. It's like, this is where Americans are going. Yeah.

Like, you are getting so many more eyeballs than CNN right now. It's just like, and you're talking and unpacking these issues. It's not, you know, with people that disagree, but the people that are at least trying to get to the truth of why we're getting so sick and clear information. So, yeah, reading books and listening to podcasts absolutely changed my life. What books have you read which were both accessible?

and impactful when it came to sort of giving you a good view of this stuff. You came into this as a non-expert. The genetics that could create a doctor, but not the background of one,

100% I mean, I think my background is insane the corruption early my career working for these industries and then really learning from my sister So I was super impacted by food fix by Mark Hyman, which I think goes into the systemic issues Which we talked about a lot in the book Hacking of the American mind by Robert Lustig and metabolical by Robert Lustig again You can agree disagree with a lot of the finer points But I think it gives a very good overview of the metabolic health being the center of our

It's the center of health.

Um, I've been influenced by Marty McCary. He has a, uh, the price we pay. Um, it's a great book. Uh, it unpacks the system. Um, Sarah Gottfried, uh, does really good work on hormones. Um, I'm looking forward to Andrew Huberman's book. I mean, I, I think the public intellectuals that are coming forward and talking on podcasts, um, I don't agree with all of them. I, as I said, like, you know, um, we kind of had a lot of the Senate, um, you know, um,

who else do we have? Chris Palmer, brain energy. I don't know if you've had him on. He's a Harvard psychiatrist who's done groundbreaking research over the past 20 years on a radical concept of food and our environmental toxins impacting our mental health. And it's been able to reverse bipolar disorder and other psychiatric disorders through metabolic insights. And yeah, we cite so many of those books, so many of those people, but Casey and I

And what's been really gratifying is like, and this was our target audience. You know, when you write a book, it's like, who's your target audience? It's somebody that's already kind of listening to your podcast and on the train and maybe can't quite get to their parents or can't quite get to their friends. And what we did as we were awakened on this, we realized we couldn't like badger and shame my dad into eating healthier food, but we could talk to him about ideas. We could share podcast clips. We could give him books and he's radically changed everything.

his world and his diet and his health. And that's what I love hearing about this book is people are buying more copies and giving it to friends who they want to impact. And, you know- I think you guys sat at number one on Amazon for, and I think were then knocked off by Dr. Seuss, one doctor by another doctor, unfortunately. Dude, I think it's very accessible, which I think is important. You know, I'm so-

grateful for the guys that go into the weeds, the Ateers of the world, the Huberman of the world, the Evidence Base. - Oh, Outlive is a great book, of course. - But especially if you're going to be the thin end of the wedge to get people into a discussion about broader health,

Tell me some stories, make it accessible. Not that Peter's or Andrew's or whatever it wasn't or isn't going to be, but that needs to be the priority. I think that so much of the communication is, I don't, I feel like I'm kind of watching season nine of Game of Thrones and I didn't see any of the stuff getting up to here and this doesn't really, I can't, I can't connect with it.

Well, that's what we're trying to do. I mean, we stand on the, just, just the shoulders of just so many of the public intellectuals. I think it's so brave what Dr. Heerman has done and Atiyah just getting out there and sharing this content. They've changed millions of lives. And yeah, what Casey and I are trying to do is, is put the stories and really make the point that

People have more agency and power and it's really more simple than led to believe. I think, I think, you know, I've been so impacted by, by so many people that come on your podcast, but I think sometimes we get into like too much nuance and debate on like, you

what the correct diet is or what the correct exercise regimen is. Is it zone two? Is it strength training? There's not an epidemic of unhealthy people that are eating mostly whole foods. There's not an epidemic of unhealthy people that are doing 180 minutes of exercise a week, whether that's zone two or HIIT. I think what we have to incentivize from public policy and clinical guidelines is just the simple basics. We're getting two hours less- It speaks to the-

level the relative dysfunction of most people compared with everybody listening to this podcast. Everybody in podcastistan and substakistan, they want to talk about their zone 2 versus their hit and their rep range from 12 to 16 or from 20 to 24 and how many reps in reserve. They want to talk about that because that's the level they're working at and they're looking to make that improvement. Again, going back to the accessibility conversation,

the people who haven't got off the couch for, and, and as still smoking is still, you know, I think I looked at this really crazy stat about alcohol consumption, uh, which is like super interesting. It was looking at, let me see if I can pull this up for you here.

Not there. There it is. The top 10% of alcohol drinkers in the US consume 74 drinks per week. 30% of American adults don't drink at all. Another 30% consume on average less than one drink per week. The top 10% of adults, 24 million of them, consume an average of 74 drinks per week or a little more than 10 drinks per day. The entire alcohol industry is propped up by binge drinkers. Power users. Yep. Wow. Wow.

I mean, essentially, I'm unpacking this idea on alcohol a little bit. Like, I think it's actually a model of where we need to get to with food. It's like, we should have societally destabilizing things. And like, we shouldn't be banning everything. Like, I think in a weird way, like what we do with alcohol, which causes deaths, which causes devastation, you know, which causes broken family. It caused a lot of harm. Like,

We should allow these things in individual choice in society. But I think the problem with the food industry is it's gotten just too far along with really, really demonstrably toxic and addictive chemicals in the things that we can market and give to kids. And it's just like, it's not about banning Coke and banning these ingredients, but it's just like the fact that we've been able to get them into our normal food in a unique way in America is just like, it's just, and the fact that our regulatory agents encourage them is really important.

is really a problem. - Well, again, man, I'm the, a good example, I'm a good split test of the same person in two different countries. And despite the fact that I train more, sleep more, have a day job instead of a night job, and yeah, I'm having to just eat meat and berries for a few months to, okay, let's do this elimination diet and let's go on this protocol and let's do all of this other stuff.

So yeah, man. Cali Means, ladies and gentlemen, where should people go? They're going to want to keep up to date with all of the different things that you've got going on. - Cali Means on the socials. We're working really hard advocating building up a community of folks to write members of Congress and talk about these issues. And I think we got a big election coming up and no matter what happens, we're building a tribe to talk about these things and trumed.com.

Every single person should contribute to your HSA, FSA and demand a letter of medical assessment from your doctor for root cause items. And TrueMed can help with that too. Heck yeah. Callie, I appreciate you, man. Thank you, sir.