WATCH OUT! The Food Industry's LIES and HOW they are Slowly POISONING US... | Calley Means | Transcription

Note: This transcription is split and grouped by topics and subtopics. You can navigate through the Table of Contents on the left. It's interactive. All paragraphs are timed to the original video. Click on the time (e.g., 01:53) to jump to the specific portion of the video.

Introduction

Intro (00:00)

If you stack rank the things that are gonna be responsible for the destruction of the American experiment, right? Number one is the fact that we let ourselves get fatter, sicker, more depressed, more infertile at an increasing rate while bankrupting the country. Early in my career, I consulted for Coke to ensure sugar taxes failed, and soda was included in food stamp funding.

The Food Industry And Its Impact On Health

Big Food & SNAP (00:15)

I say Coke's policies are evil because I saw inside the room. The first step in the playbook was paying the NAACP plus other civil rights groups to call opponents racist. What is going on with big food, and is it making us sick? Cancer, Alzheimer's, heart disease, obesity, autoimmune conditions, these are all going up and they are all food-borne illnesses. And the fact that there is not clear communication about that from our medical leaders and public policy leaders, I think is the biggest scandal in America in the most dangerous scandal. We are being brought to our knees by metabolic dysfunction tied to food, eight of the 10 killers of Americans. As I mentioned, some of them are directly tied to food. That also includes depression. Depression is skyrocketing as Chris Palmer-Haward and some other prominent doctors are pointing out, brain conditions are metabolic dysfunctions. I frame it that way to kind of set the table that what's happening right now in America, we're 30% of children. Children have prediabetes. Where 80% of adults are obese or overweight. Where 50% of adults have fatty liver disease and 20% of teens have fatty liver disease. You only saw this condition in elderly alcoholics just a generation ago. We're destroying our human capital and obviously our budget from something we're being told is complicated, but it's very simple. And it's taken me many, many years to come to this conclusion. And as I have through being inspired by my sister and other leaders in the metabolic health space that we can talk about, I looked back early in my career. And I was raised with my sister kind of compulsively to get all the credentials. We're working for President Bush, working for prominent politicians, Stanford, Harvard. My sister and I both went to Stanford. We were kind of going up the ranks. She became a doctor. I was advising politicians and prominent food and pharma companies. And I think a lot of people, and I certainly was like this kind of gets in that path and doesn't ask many questions. And reflecting back early in my career as I worked in politics and then consulted for food and pharma, I found myself helping specifically Coca-Cola keep a huge portion of their revenue, which was food stamp dollars, $10 billion a year is transferred from the government treasury to soda companies. $10 billion of money goes from food stamps to soda, to sugary drinks. And this is a nutrition program that 15% of the American people depend on as their core nutrition. It's called SNAP now, supplemental nutrition. There's no other country in the world that for their key lower income nutrition program, funnels that money to diabetes water, as I call it. Sugar consumption among children has gone up 100 X and 100 years. It's not a medical mystery why obesity, childhood diabetes, all these things are skyrocketed. It's kind of sugar, but primarily it's because of a nuclear weapon to metabolic health, which is diabetes water, which is sugar water, which is basically a new invention. So we're subsidizing that and Coke wanted to keep it that way.

What is the game in the food industry (03:36)

- What is the game exactly? Is it manipulate the way that people think to get you to eat the most addictive foods? And so it's just a money making scheme or is there something else going on? The biggest issue in the world in my opinion is the devil's bargain where food is making us sick. We're getting addicted and it's making us sick. And then the medical system is profiting it from the fact that everyone's getting sick. So taking the food companies, in a way, if you just take their interests, it kind of makes sense. And just diving in specifically to working for Coke. They want to grow their revenues and they want to keep food cheap and they want to keep it addictive. So you have that strategic imperative for their business and then it's like, how do we do that? And it's very straightforward. It's how do we rig institutions of trust? So who are the stakeholders, the stakeholders, the consumers, the stakeholders, our lawmakers? So who do they trust? They trust civil rights groups. They trust medical organizations. They trust their schools. They trust their doctors. They trust researchers.

How do they rig the system (04:35)

So you literally just go down the list and then it's very simple. It's like, how do we rig those institutions as much as we possibly can? When you say rig, what do you mean? Use them against the public? Well, it's going to specific examples. So the tweet was about the NAACP. So prominent civil rights organization has done amazing things in American history. But right now, prominent organizations like the NAACP, like the Hispanic Federation, like many other prominent civil rights groups are pay-to-play organizations. And this was as transactional as going to McDonald's and ordering a big Mac. I as a junior person had the strategic imperative to racialize the debate around whether we should stop food stamp money going to soda, which was bipartisan issue. It's not complicated, right? When you call someone a racist or a sexist, it shuts down the debate. So we call up the NAACP, the PR firms have their number. There's a lot of partnerships. And you schedule a meeting. And it's not like we're going to evilly pay you. But it's like, hey, your constituencies, lower income African American children, like their co-x, here's the statistic. And they're trying to take that coke away and trying to restrict choice. We'd love to do an honorarium, a donation, millions of dollars in this case. And would you marshal some of your allies in various states and on the federal level to say that it's racist, what's trying to happen of restricting choice on food stamps? - Sure. - Why isn't it? Why isn't that actually true? Like maybe that really is a racist thing to do. And maybe we really should be putting the brakes on it. I mean, obviously, I don't know that that isn't what I believe, but I wanna at least look at that angle and figure out how do we know that isn't true. It's important. In the tweet that went viral, I use the word evil. And I don't think from being in the rooms, in this case, folks from the NAACP or other institutions we can talk about, I don't think many people are truly evil. I don't think the head of Pfizer is evil. I don't think the head of a research group that's doing at a university that's doing fraudulent research is evil. But the system is evil. So let's just take your question here. The NAACP has the express mission of advocating for their community, which in their case is African Americans, particularly lower income and disadvantaged folks. The biggest civil rights issue in the country, the biggest social justice issue in the country, is demonstrably nutrition. Lower income American man dies 11 years younger than an upper income American man. This is because of one thing primarily. It is because their diet on the lower income spectrum is massively ultra processed. It's from these ingredients, sugar, seed oils and highly processed grains. And we can dive into those three, but those literally didn't exist 100 years ago. These are biologically just completely foreign.

Are these chemicals around to addict us (07:30)

- But they come to be, so I think that the fundamental argument is gonna come down to, are they trying to get you addicted? Are they, is the government subsidizing the foods that are most addictive? Or does this all start with good intentions and the government is trying to subsidize the calories that they think they can mass produce for the cheapest? Because when you look at, everybody thought, we're gonna hit some sort of population crisis and we're not gonna be able to feed people and it's gonna be cataclysmic. Doesn't come to pass. We end up finding ways to make food cheaper and cheaper. So it's like, is the bargain, hey, we've made you really cheap ingredients. Corns, oh, I forget what the three are, green corn, whatever. We've made these calories extraordinarily cheap and by the way, we haven't punished the people that eat the cheap calories. We've made them extremely delicious. Now, what you and I know is Bummer City that also ends up causing all this disease and we're gonna have to come face to face with that in a second, but first I wanna like figure out, did we think this started with good intentions? Maybe does it even matter, but when you think it began?

How our government started down this path (08:38)

So I've become a student of this issue and the answer is yes, it did start with good intentions, partly. So this started with Nixon. So when Nixon was running for a president for reelection, food prices was a huge political issue. So it was a big political liability. It was like one of the issues of the campaign is fluctuating and increasing food prices. So he and hunger to some degree, but it was really around fluctuating food prices, which were being traced to hunger to some degree. So it was a big political liability for him. And also you could argue a public policy problem at the time. So that steered this modern ecosystem we have today of massive subsidies. Do you know the moment where they decided what to subsidize? Yeah, they decided to subsidize things that become shelf stable. So they could basically manage food supplies. So that was a shift, that was a decision to shift from whole food. But as somebody that had to make shelf stable items back in my last company, it's really pulling the water out of the item. It doesn't have to be, I mean, it is going to be processed, but it doesn't have to be bad for you. So did they, we just hadn't run the experiment and people didn't know? Well, it's gonna end up- 80% of the 80% go right now. And I think a lot of this is not in quest to what I'm seeing is to highly process grains, is to enrich flour basically. So if you look at any, go to a gas station and pick up any processed food, the first ingredient, probably second and third, is some kind of highly processed grain. And the processed- Or sugar, quite frankly. Exactly. So it's sugar, seed oils, and highly processed grain. It's actually miraculous what American ingenuity can do with those three ingredients. You take any food into some mixture of those things. And again, it's usually multiple sugars, multiple highly processed grains, and multiple seed oils, canola, soybean, things like that. So the processing of the grain means taking the fiber off, which the fiber is what, number one, blunts the glucose impact of a whole grain, right? Number two, it's where a lot of the nutrition is, but it erodes, it goes stale. So the processing is taking that fiber off. So that's what the 70s with these good intentions basically did. They're like, we need these things to shell for years. So we're gonna take that fiber off, and then we're gonna create these Franken foods and add them with a lot of sugar to make them more addictive. And I know you've talked to people in the past who've helped weaponize, and I think weaponize is the right word, our food system. This is one of the largest industries in the world, and they've got very smart people. And then as we've basically subsidized and created more Franken foods, and since that time, ultra processed food has gone from well below 20% of our diet to now close to 70%. So the incentives and this emphasis started with good intentions. But I'd actually frame the question like taking you today is like, what is the biggest problem in the world today? The biggest problem in the country. If you stack rank the things that are gonna be responsible for the destruction of the American experiment, right? Number one is the fact that we let ourselves get fatter, sicker, more depressed, more infertile at an increasing rate while bankrupting the country. I mean, we're 20% of, you know, and I just wanna like everyone to like really focus on these statistics. 'Cause I think when we talk about the growth of healthcare spending, it's like our ice gloss over, it's so common to hear this. It's like 20% of JDP growing at an increasing rate.

Healthcare (12:03)

Healthcare is the largest and fastest growing industry in the United States. Let's just step out. - That's awesome. - And think about that people. It's one of those, I think part of why people, their ice gloss over is healthcare is tied to like every one of my employees cares about their healthcare. Every one of them on the way and wants to know what are the options that we offer for insurance? Like people really care about this. And so what I think people miss, and this is where you really got my attention. 'Cause you're like, everything is about creating confusion. And the goal is just to create enough confusion, whether I'm shutting you down, 'cause I'm calling you a racist and I'm saying this is problematic, or I'm funding a study that says, "No, no, no, it's not sugar, "it's not the problem genetics or the problem." Or what's the most recent one, gas stoves or whatever? - Gas stoves, not where you're cooking on them. - Yeah, exactly. So it's like they're trying to create enough confusion so that this seems like a very complicated thing. And we're all missing the point that the reality is even, and this is where I was like, we can't do this whole interview and me not ask the questions, even though I don't agree with them, they're even in the hardcore fitness, health industry, people are like a calorie is a calorie. And that if you're saying that one calorie is better than another, you're out of your mind. So if it's like, if the people that are shredded and they look amazing and their whole focus is health, even there pushing something that I'm like, at a cellular level, you are out of your mind, then you understand how confusion ends up taking over this whole argument. - So it's been an amazing journey in the past couple months. As I said, I was born and raised in DC, started my career there. I've been met with 50 members of Congress and senators on this issue, actually. Some of them have DME, I've been doing a lot of work in DC. And I think even with them, very well intentioned, they have kids, they see the massive metabolic dysfunction, prediabetes, obesity among their children. They're very worried, but just to paint a picture, sitting with members of Congress, they don't even understand the concept fully that they're playing the game that's been created for them, where both parties are debating how to increase access to the system that's creating destruction. I run a company too, and healthcare is very important, but everyone's concerned about access to a system that is causing violence. And my framework on this-- - You have to explain that. - My framework on this is, I think, how we've been gaslighted.

Miracles (14:23)

When you can think of any medical miracle, like what would you say a medical, like what comes to mind when you think of like what's really propelled life expectancy in the last 100 years? - Antibiotics. - Great. So antibiotics is a solve for an acute situation. It's something that's gonna kill you imminently that infection, you take it for a week and you stop using it. Any medical, I would argue, anyone can think of her name that's really propelled life expectancy forward is for an acute situation. Complicated childbirth, emergency surgical procedures. Giving birth 100 years ago for a woman was more dangerous than having breast cancer today. - That's crazy.

Trust the medical system on chronic conditions. (15:05)

- An appendicitis, gunshot wound. These medical miracles, if you have a burst of penics or you have something that's gonna imminently kill you, we have a miracle medical system. Unfortunately today, what's happened is we've taken that trust and we've asked people to trust the medical system on chronic conditions. So now 90% of healthcare costs plus are on managing chronic conditions of people that are already sick. And what's happened? The more statins we prescribe, the more heart disease goes up. The more metformin we prescribe, the more diabetes goes up. The more SSRIs we prescribe, the more depression and suicidone. - You have to be careful with that one. So because that isn't causative, right? It's not like as in, well, we don't know, I suppose. But it's certainly the studies have not been done that say that the more statins you prescribe, the more heart disease goes up, but there certainly is a correlation that we have not managed to reduce the incidence of that. But there's one thing before we get lost in that that I wanna say is that the thing that I think people are missing about healthcare is that it isn't healthcare, it's sick care. And so the whole system is designed, "Hey, something is making you sick, "which is great for business if you're in the quote-unquote "healthcare industry."

The whole system is sick care. (16:07)

But the hypothesis I would put down and I know that you'd put down the same one is the thing that's making you sick predominantly, there are probably other problems as well, but the thing that's making you sick predominantly is what you're eating. So you're eating something that's making you sick and this really chronic, slow, gives us lots of symptoms to treat with lots of medication that you have to take every day. And that's great for business. And so now you've got insurance companies that the only way for them, because there's regulations, the only way for them to get their bottom line to go up is to get more sick people, because they have to pay out what, all but 15% or something. - That's right. - So they're hemmed in from how they can make money, oh, if more people get sick, amazing. So while they're not necessarily driving the food industry, they probably aren't doing their best to lobby against the things that are happening to make certain things cheaper, because those things are making it sicker, so on and so forth. So people switch it and we called it sickness management and then we had preventive healthcare, then I think there would be much, like people would approach this with their eyes open to the real problem. - You would never design a system, you'd never come down, as an alien, come down to earth and see 80% of adults having obesity or being overweight, 50% diabetes or prediabetes rate among adults, 93% of Americans, metabolic dysfunction, which is driving 90 to 95% of all healthcare costs, eight out of 10 leading costs of death. You'd never say, let's wait for everyone to get sick and then give them an incremental pill. One thing I'd push on a little bit is that I think we put nutrition and lifestyle habits in this niche preventative box. When my sister, Dr. Casey Means, was at Stanford Medical School and a patient with debilitating migraines and depression and hypertension, she mentioned maybe they should look at their diet, the attending surgeon said, "Don't be a pussy." And said, "We did not go to nutrition school, "we do serious medical interventions here, "which is through a prescription pad "or through a surgical intervention." That is the predominant mindset in American medicine, right? Doctors aren't nutritionists. 90% of doctors graduate without one nutrition class, 80% of med schools in the United States, to this day, Stanford Harvard on down don't require a single nutrition class to graduate.

Doctors are not nutritionists. (18:28)

So, scandalous. But this is where it points to something other than evil. This is just moronic. Well, I think the system is evil. I don't think the Dean of Stanford Medical School is evil, right? But when Casey was there, the Dean of Stanford Medical School was a pain specialist, Dr. Pizzo. And he, the lifeblood of medical schools, right, is funding and research funding and the vast majority of that comes from pharma. So, when he was Dean of Stanford Medical School, Dr. Philip Pizzo, he accepted a multimillion dollar donation from Pfizer and other leading opioid companies, okay? And they built a new center. And then he was appointed to the NIH panel to make, in 2011, I believe, to make opioid guidance. And he appointed 90% of the people that he brought on that panel also had conflicts, not just with their research funding, but personal consulting payments from opioid companies. And they created more relaxed opioid standards. And today, when you hear about the opioid crisis, 80 to 90% of people that overdose and die from illicit opioids, that started with a legal prescription pad. So, it's all very nice, but like, that's how the system works. So, it's like, is Philip Pizzo, who's still at Stanford, is he a terrible person? I don't think so, but I do think it's a lack of moral clarity and frankly, a lack of leadership that they don't call this out. You know, I have talked on this journey to leaders at Harvard Medical School, to leaders at insurance companies, to leaders at pharmaceutical companies. They're aware of what's going on, but there's plausible deniability for everyone in the system. So, I do actually think, and, you know, I'm advised, you know, everyone likes their doctor not to attack doctors, and I think doctors, by and large, are doing great work on an individual level and trapped in the bad system. But I will say this, I think anyone smart in these systems, I think understands what's going on. And it's not, it's just going back to what you said real quick, it's not that we need to stress, I don't like this bucket of prevention. That's interesting. Food is the best reversal. It's the best reversal. So, let's just take-- But an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. But I think we put food in this niche, it's very important for prevention. We should be, if we were creating our healthcare system from scratch, we'd be paying-- You just want them to also use it instead of drugs for curing some of these other problems. I'm asking the medical system to trust the science. Take somebody with Alzheimer's. Take somebody with depression, right? Take somebody with other conditions. Let's take those one by one. Alzheimer's is now called type 3 diabetes. The book The End of Alzheimer's, a lot of research coming out of major universities, by far the most efficacious way to reverse. You can actually reverse dementia is a rigorous food and lifestyle intervention. And a lot of people in the medical system throw up their hands like, "Nobody's going to do that." No patients are told that. I've talked to-- I have yet to meet a person whose parents are dealing with Alzheimer's, who's even been mentioned that from the doctors. It's not in the standard of care.

Obesity medicine has conflicts of interest. (21:47)

You know, we propel government money, tens of thousands of dollars, if not more, per patient, per Alzheimer's patient. We could pay those patients to exercise. Like, there's public policy means to promote what is the best medicine. Depression, 150 minutes of moderate exercise, zone 2 exercise, like light exercise, for three months consistently, 150 minutes a week, is according to peer reviewed academic studies, is more effective than SSRI, the leading antidepressant with less side effects. Psychologists aren't telling that to patients. If your mission is achieving excellence, you must support your body. Introducing AG1. This powerhouse blend is packed with 75 premium vitamins, minerals, and whole food sourced ingredients that elevate your immune system, uplift your mood, and promote restful sleep. And Athletic Greens is offering our listeners a free one year supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase. Don't miss this opportunity to optimize your health and truly be legendary. Let's go to another one. Diabetes, we spend a trillion dollars plus of government money on diabetes management. Until 2018, the American Diabetes Association, which sets the standard care for diabetes, says that if you take your drugs, you can eat whatever you want. They literally said that on their website. They said you can continue eating whatever food you want. And just real quick, back to the stands, the metformin, these drugs, not, I would argue actually they are. I'd argue you actually stand. - That's a positive. - Absolutely. Because what's happening is when you're given a stand, it's like this solves the problem, right? When you're given that formin, literally the American Diabetes Association is saying you can eat whatever you want. Now with those Impik, you have Dr. Fatima Stanford at Harvard, you know, on 60 Minutes saying that obesity is genetic, that it is quote, not tied to food or lifestyle. - That is crazy. There is no universal which that was said. - What's up? - Dude, there's no way. - On 60 Minutes? - Not possible. - On 60 Minutes. There's no way. And she said food, it's a relic of the past to tie food. And she said it's quote, "a brain disease and genetic." This issue that's only been an issue in the past 50 years. So think about this. This is the head. - Food is not implicated in obesity, according to this person. - Everyone should watch Dr. Fatima Stanford who's the lead obesity doctor at Harvard, talking on 60 Minutes. She has paid tens of thousands of dollars a year by Novo Nordik's The Maker of Oz, and of course this new field of obesity medicine stands to gain lifetime patience. So Dr. Fatima Stanford at Harvard has also said that it is quote, "structural racism "to not have government funding for ozimpic." So let's go back, you know, we're going all over the place here, I think it's good. I think this is a complicated multi-fast issue, but let's go back to the NAACP, right? This is actually crazy. So the NAACP, the number one issue for African American children, right? It's skyrocking rates of diabetes or obesity, which is really setting their lives back.

Obesity (24:59)

Obesity is cellular dysregulation, particularly in the brain. You're over two times more likely to commit suicide or have depression if you have prediabetes or obesity. Excuse me, diabetes is cellular dysregulation, and obesity is the visual manifestation of that. That's the problem, right? Like the problem is that there's not great habits and we're eating inflammatory food. So the NAACP didn't look at that. They said, "Let's keep soda." Now you wouldn't even believe this. The NAACP is being paid by ozimpic to argue that it's a civil rights issue to give those same kids ozimpic, okay? And here's the problem with that. Here's the problem with the stand in that form and the siloing of conditions. When patients are told the stand solves the problem, the ozimpic solves the problem, and don't change what they're putting in their bodies, it's just so simple. They're continuing, patients are continuing to put inflammatory food into their bodies, which leads into other unlucky conditions. They leads into other comorbidities. 80% of people with diabetes have at least three other chronic conditions. My mom, who's really been in a huge inspiration for me, is a perfect example of this. I was born at 12 pounds, large baby, clear sign that she had metabolic dysfunction. She got high fives from the doctor, oh, it's a big baby, great job. Distational diabetes, everyone has that. A couple years later, she had high cholesterol, stan. It's a rite of passage, no problem. A couple years later, that form in, pre-diabetes. It's fine, 50% of people, 60% of people your age have, it's not a problem. Hypertension medication, oh, it's fine. You know, not even a blip, not even a what, these are rites of passage. So she has all these comorbidities, and then she's taking a hike. She feels a pain in her stomach. She goes and gets a scan, has stage four pancreatic cancer, and is dead 12 days later. - Jesus.

Health Solutions And Moral Clarity

Pancreatic cancer (26:48)

- Pancreatic cancer is a foodborne illness. Every single one of those instances, right, from my birth on, was an opportunity. It was a warning sign. These things are connected, they're not siloed conditions. Heart disease is not a stand deficiency. Obesity is not a ozentvik deficiency. So I do think it's a very causal, and I think this ridiculousness of asking for the peer-reviewed studies to show that we shouldn't be eating highly processed shit is playing on the wrong game. We're the only animal in the world that systematically obese and metaglochis functional, aside from the animals that we've domesticated and feed our food. Like we don't need studies for this. You don't have systematic rates of diabetes and obesity among wild wolves, but dogs that we've domesticated have a 50% cancer rate, and a 50% depression rate. That's what I would argue to you, I think it's systematically happening with the complexity issue, is that we've siloed diseases into all of these lanes. When Casey graduated Stanford Medical School, she had to decide between 42 specialties, right? A doctor devotes their entire lives to a couple of square inches of the body. That's the way our system works. And we have lost our way on that. And we have really, I think it gets to actually a spiritual crisis in our country, where we've completely taken ourselves away from any type of curiosity or awe about our bodies, what's going into them, exercise, movement, sleep, looking at the sun. Literally, looking at the sun, when Casey talked about that in these more kind of metabolic soon you mean get sunlight on your skin. Don't look at the sun every day watching them. Getting some sunlight in your eyes. I mean, doctor here has been talking a lot about that. But you know, direct sunlight in your eyes anyway. Yeah, this is huge, before we go on this, there's something really important. So I want to use Cali means to contradict Cali means. Oh gosh. As we were going, you said, I really want people to follow the science, and then you said we don't need studies to understand this. And you put out a tweet, which I thought was really amazing. Heart disease, obesity, diabetes, depression, kidney disease, autoimmune conditions, stroke and allergies have all skyrocketed at the exact time we started spending money to treat them. The medical system deserves zero trust on chronic disease management. And so what I say to all that is, I think this goes back to your initial idea that confusion is being weaponized, but it is confusing. And it's somebody that I've had so many people on the show. And the number of comments that I get from people like, which is it, man? Some people are telling me I need to eat meat. Other people are telling me I need to be vegan. Other people are telling me I need to do both. Some people are telling me I need supplements. Some not supplements. Some are saying skin cancer is a result of getting sun exposure. Other people are like, you're gonna die of 18 different cancers if you don't get sun in your skin. It's like, what am I supposed to do? So if I were to boil the nature of the problem from a non-political standpoint, we'll get to that. I think it's really important. We are certainly gonna have to face that. But I think part of what's going on here is that we have given up on making people responsible for their own body. And man, I get it. It comes from a great place. People don't wanna see people suffer. But at the end of the day, you cannot just write people off. And my favorite story along these lines is from a guy named Jim Abrams. And he was the guy that directed the movie Airplane back in the 70s. The Great Boer. And his son had intractable seizures. And they couldn't get him to stop. And he was having like a hundred grand mal seizures a day. Like imagine that. Stunting your growth, your intellectual developments on pause. He goes to the doctor to try everything, drugs, everything, nothing's working, nothing's working. And then he was like, man, I don't trust the medical establishment. I'm gonna figure this out for myself. Go's and looks it up. Find some ancient study from like the 50s or something that's like, oh, by the way, there's this thing called the ketogenic diet. It can be used to treat seizures. And so he goes to the doctor and he's like, why didn't you tell me about this? And the doctor was like, oh, because nobody will stick with it. And he was like, motherfucker, like you need to let me know what my options are. And then we'll see. He puts his son on the ketogenic diet. His son has not had a seizure in like 25 years. So the fact that people aren't even being given, like that they're not studying this, first of all, is madness. The fact that the doctors themselves, I would love to know a stat, how many doctors are overweight and suffer from a lot of these things. - Higher than the general population. - Because here's the thing, they don't understand because they're, they're abdicating their own responsibility to say like, I should be able to figure this out. So for instance, I have a rule in my own life. I avoid supplements wherever humanly possible. I avoid drugs wherever possible. It doesn't mean I don't take the occasional drug. If I need something, let me tell you right now. I will fucking take it and I'm very glad they exist. But if I never take a drug until I've tried some sort of lifestyle or dietary intervention first, and the number of things that that has addressed in my life, including the one that I thought for sure was only going to have a drug solution, which was anxiety. And PS, if you have anxiety and you're struggling by all means, try a drug. But I would say, if you can't avoid being on it every day, that would be way better. And for me, the impact of diet on my anxiety, anxiety was life changing. And so the fact that, and this is probably, this is definitely my own life philosophy, leaking out here, man, people need to, your life is an exact reflection of your choices. That is gonna be unpopular and people are gonna flame me in the comments. But I'm just telling you right now, if you act as if your life is an exact reflection of your choices, you will put yourself in the driver's seat, you will make wiser choices, and you will have a shot at getting out of this. But when the pushback on people is, well, nobody's going to adhere to that diet. Before we started rolling, you said, the argument is people might go from honey nut Cheerios to Cheerios, but they're never gonna go from honey nut Cheerios to chicken breast. That is a big part of the problem. Because the studies are all over the place, you're gonna get conflicting information. But if you just figure out what works for you, you will be fine. So many people are listening to this podcast. Joe Rogan, you know, on down. Whether it's a health focused or just general focused, the most popular independent media in the country, the most popular books in the country, the most popular outlets in the country are talking about people taking empowerment on their health. I think there is a sinister and wrong idea about the American people that's propagated by the medical system is that they're lazy. Think about what we're being told. When you are highly obese, your life expectancy is like eight years younger, right? You know, my mom was desperately trying, you know, to not miss the birth of my son, which she did. She didn't wanna miss that.

The Problem with Bottoms Up Health Solutions (34:08)

She, her house was stacked with books by Dr. Mark Hyman and Robert Lustig and metabolic health pioneers. People aren't trying to miss walking their daughter down the aisle, have a shorter, more depressed life. Like this is a lie, I think a sinister lie, that doctors are indoctrinated with from the moment med school starts, that they stand with the prescription pad and the scalpel, you know, to clean up the mess of this lazy American population that is addicted to their sugary drinks and their Big Macs and sedentary lifestyles. That is just not the case. So there's a bottoms up and a top down. And I think everyone listening to this podcast, you know, and reading these books are on a bottoms up revolution, where I think they're trying to be around longer for their kids and looking around at kids concerned, I think there is just an uprising and just indignation of what's happening to kids in this country. There's big lobbying groups for Coca-Cola, no lobbying groups for the fact that 30% of kids are now pre-diabetic. So I just think that whole, this whole idea, you know, people want to be healthy. That is a premise I refuse to be dissuaded of and people need the information. And the first message that I'm trying to establish is the first part of bottoms up is understanding the systems that you operate in and having the courage to speak out. When the American Academy of Pediatrics, the majority of their funding comes from pharma. They receive millions of dollars in the maker of Ozempic. They receive millions of dollars from makers of diabetes drugs, right? And they said that the first thing a kid should he has highly processed grains, they're arguing that- - Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, where did they say that? - The American Academy of Pediatrics gives it, pediatricians give a pamphlet out and they say, "The first thing a child should eat is little puffs." - Huh? - Literally, that's what the recommendation on the- - So from breast milk to cocuffs. - To puffs, which is just absurd. Obviously if you think about just how we're biologically and evolutionally made, you know, what to eat. And of course, the American Academy of Pediatrics with absolute violence happening against kids, you know, as we're subsidizing tens of billions of dollars for soda, what do you call it, violence? 'Cause their cells are, we have violence occurring to the cells of children. Prediabetes is violence occurring to their cells. A child born today, right? A teenager has a 45% rate of obesity or being overweight. The 20% fatty liver disease rate. 40% of 18 year olds right now qualify as having a mental illness. Whoa. The American Academy of Pediatrics, which is credentialed to set the standard of care, you know, for how children are treated in the United States. A doctor will be reprimanded if they go against the American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines. They were nowhere to be found during the food stand debate with Coke. In fact, I was helping to engineer payments from Coke to the American Academy of Pediatrics, which accepts processed food money. At that time, I saw, as Coke funneled, millions of dollars to the American Diabetes Association. That's crazy.

The Lack of Moral Clarity in American Adults (37:23)

The American Diabetes Association accepted money from Coke, millions of dollars. They said that small cans of Coke, you know, might be a good idea. Might be a good idea. Or it doesn't hurt as much. It was on the website, that small cans of Coke might be an option for diabetics. Also the group that credentials and sets a nutritionist policy accepted money from Coke. So that was a huge strategy. So they gladly accepted money. And now the American Academy of Pediatrics, instead of saying, you know, that a child who's 12 and obese needs to learn how to eat whole food, not eat all to processed food and not be sedentary, so they can live a mentally and physically healthy life and be a productive member of society, they're saying that child needs a shot, a weekly shot, a zimpick, which the labels-- - And your race is to be done with that. - Which the label says that you should take it for your entire life, not go off of it. Or you will have massive metabolic function. I mean, you know, just going to kind of, I think where the lack of leadership moral cowardice is, you can take this to every institution, you know. I raised from a lot of, or met with a lot of venture capitalists from my new thing, right? A lot of them are investing in this sick care system. You know, Alexis O'Honey and this guy that's very vocal on social justice issues is on the board of Roe. And it's tweeting now how it's an urgent imperative. - What's Roe? - Roe is the largest direct consumer, one of them, Abu Zimpik. They're trying, they're putting up billboards in New York City saying that millennials should be getting ozimpik and they're writing blog posts saying it's an urgent national imperative for government funding for ozimpik, for 80% of the population who's a beast or a way to steer instead of $2,000 a month of government money, which is what ozimpik is. Instead of steering that to better food, we need to steer that to ozimpik. You have so leading investors now saying that that's an urgent national imperative, you know, who are also talking about other social justice issues. Like that, like he's not a bad person, this Alexis O'Honey and Guy, but if we're really concerned about that 12 year old, a particularly an underprivileged 12 year old, these incentives have blinded us. And I do think that's violence to kids. I think there is an absolute lack of moral clarity among adults who are paying their mortgages, you know, and buying their houses in the Hamptons and going under vacations funded by a sick care system.

The Solution (39:49)

I mean, this is a material part of the economy, 78% of states in the United States, the largest employer is a hospital system or a food retailer at Walmart. These are really, by some respects, the two largest industries in the United States. So people's mortgages, you know, and then just take it to the investing and the consulting, you know, for these industries, it's such a massive part of the economy we've been, we've been blinded, I think. - Wow, okay, so I wanna lay out what I think is the solution. So we've done a reasonably good job and there's probably more to go, but in terms of the problem. So in fact, quicks and offsets of the problem. You've got ingredients or crops that are being subsidized by the government that make calories cheaper and delicious. And even if it was started with good intentions, we're now at the point where for a certain subset of the population, it is beyond self-evident that the root cause of most modern ailments, what you're calling eight out of the 10 top killers are what the words you use are foodborne illnesses, which I like. I will say food caused. So your diet is causing metabolic disease and that metabolic disease manifests in different ways in different people, but it's eight out of the 10 top killers. And so you're eating too many grains, you're eating way too much sugar, you're eating way too many highly processed food items. Okay, that's the problem. That's creating this metabolic dysregulation, which is killing people on the installment plan. All right, solution to me is really simple. And people can argue about the finesse of this, whether you should be vegan or whether me, to a carnivore or whatever, honestly on that, I don't care. But I will say that the really simple baseline so that people don't feel like, "Oh, this is all over my head." Eat whole food whenever possible. Avoid anything that spikes your glucose. Get plenty of sleep, get sunlight, exercise. If you do those, you're going to minimize your disease burden, you're going to theoretically, and this is one I will say, if people wanna call me out and say that the thing that I prescribe is not gonna elongate their life enough, fair enough, I won't know until the end of it. We are being lied to that this is complicated. You are absolutely right. And it's such a simple point that you just made that I think we can almost gloss over that 'cause it's just like eat healthy sleep. It's the most profound and important point in America. We should abolish nutrition research in this country and give them the list you just said and try to make public policy around that simple list. - But how do you convince people? Because to your own point, follow the science, we don't need studies, right? It's this whipsaw of like, people look at the data, but you've got people funding studies to make sure that the data is muddy. So it's like you and I both look at certain studies and we go, "I have a lot of faith in this study." But the only thing that makes me so arrogant in my approach is that I've done it in my own life. And so you can tell me whatever you want about how I should eat and I just know, I used to be 60 pounds heavier and I'm not now. And I've maintained that for years and years. If I go like over the holidays, I let loose, I eat all the foods that are gonna kill me. It's wonderful and I really enjoy it for a short period of time and I put on fat during that time. And I know, I have no stress about it 'cause I know exactly how to lose that fat. - So a lot of the folks that have come on this show and you talked about kind of complicate the issue, is it carnivore, is it vegan, should I be doing hit exercises?

If you commit to more than 150 minutes of exercise per week... (43:31)

Should I be doing zone two? Should I be? The folks that have been at this microphone have changed my life and brought me on this path. I just wanna say that. I also wanna say that there are incentives, I think, among influencers and among researchers and really among everyone to complicate the issue. I think we are being systematically gassed, let by the incentives on every level to think that this is complicated. I take a little bit of objection to some of the folks with all of these protocols for exercise. And there's heated debate, there's tweets that go viral, just slamming certain exercise mindsets, they're saying you're doing too many hit exercises, high intensity interval training is bad, saying that you have to be doing these resistant exercises, litigating and slamming the other side. I just have this message, I think we're losing the plot a little bit here. If you commit to 150 minutes of getting your heart rate up a week, that is 99% of it.

the clear list for success. (44:42)

I don't think there's an epidemic of people that are committing to 150 minutes a week who are not achieving like, right, their health goals, they're not seeing improvement. I just personally speaking, with my mom dying with me being on this mission with a new son in the world, worried about him trying to improve my personal habits, I got very in the weeds on all the protocols and then I just committed that 150 minutes and then I became more curious and now I research and I are eating Whole Foods, right? This is the list, I think it's very much what you said, but it's the unholy trinity. If you scan your label and don't eat seed oils, soybean, canola, sunflower, seed oils, which were created in 1910 by John Rockefeller as an industrial byproduct of oil production, our body is not biologically created to eat, this is a new substance in our diet now, one of the top sources of American fats. If you cut seed oils, if you got highly processed grains, as I talked about earlier, the processing takes the fiber off and if you cut added sugar, which is up 100 X in 100 years, if you scan your label for those three things, you are 80% there because you'll be pushed to a largely Whole Foods diet. There's sub, so again, start with that, but there's sub things. You're talking meat or vegetables, try to have ones that are fresh without a bunch of pesticides that are organic, that are pasture raised. You know, we can go deeper into that, but if you cut those three ingredients, seed oils, highly processed grain sugar, and this is where I think it gets a little bit like, I think people, is it really that simple? Yeah, yes, if we geared, not just nutrition policy, if we geared economic and health policy in America to eliminating or reducing those three ingredients, the amount of human capital in this country that would be unleashed, the amount of increased fertility, the amount of country's economic productivity, the decrease in depression, it's unfathomable. What would happen? And it really is that simple of attacking, and I'm not even talking about bans yet, we subsidize bans, like, you know, I'm not even arguing yet to ban anything, we subsidize those ingredients over $100 billion a year, not just food stamps, which is $115 billion program, 70% of it goes to ultra processed foods, which is basically those three ingredients, 70 to 75% of food stamps. Also, school lunches, federally subsidized school lunches, one of the top sources of nutrition for children, there's no sugar limit in those lunches. Michelle Obama tried, she ended up being co-opted by the food industry, ended up talking a lot about exercise, which is what the food company pushes people to do. I eat a lot of sugar in the world, but just make sure you work out. That's why I was pushing back on 150 hours, saying, like, if you're not eating whole food already, like, exercises are gonna-- Oh, no, no, it's a stack ranked, it's a stack ranked. You have to get food right. And when I say food-borne illnesses, just to be clear, food is number one, but it's metabolic-borne illnesses. So let's just be very clear, those ingredients, then what should we put in? What should we put into our bodies? I think if you cut those ingredients, you're well in your way, but think about the micronutrients. Think about the fiber. Think about those omega-3s. You talked about not taking supplements. If you, and this is where I think where the spiritual element comes in, why aren't we trained in school? Why aren't we talking about this amazing, like, hunt for elements that help ourselves in our food? Why isn't any curiosity-- I think it is so fascinating. It's taken me to, like, later in life to really-- but it's so interesting, right? What omega-3 versus omega-6 is?

Dietary Awareness And Influence Of Government

Omega 3 vs omega 6 / carnivor vs plant-based (48:29)

How, for the all-of-human evolution, we were, you know, predominantly omega-3s, and now we're like 20 to 1 omega-6s, these inflammatory oils found in processed foods. It's totally, totally screwing over ourselves. Like, nobody-- doctors don't even know that. Doctors don't even know these things. But get on a journey. Once you cut those three ingredients, get on a journey of hunting for the micronutrients, the fiber, the antioxidants, the omega-3s, and then you can find those in a vegan diet or a carnivore diet or whatever. I actually would argue, you know, that the big carnivore influencers who are good and the vegan influencers, they've got a niche, right? They're slamming the other side. But they're essentially arguing the same thing. It's to get back to basics. It's to get back to hunting for the micronutrients, you know, that we are biologically need. So that's the most important thing. I would say on exercise, there's a lot of people-- and again, go deep, a lot of the influencers come on. I learn a lot from them as I'm on this journey. But I'm telling you, you will not be misled if you do anything to get your heart rate, you know, above a zone two or above, for 150 minutes a week, and stay consistent on that. - Is that for you though, after you get the food right or is that more important?

Why being calorie conscious doesn't work (49:45)

- You have to get the food right. - So you've got, like my son, like it is child abuse to give a child at a trigger mite. And I know it's very normalized. I know, you know, we all go to the birthday parties and especially for an infant, you know, zero to one to two, three. I'd say well into the child's life and we have any control of the food. I believe it's child abuse. Sugar by, would you let, so your son's seven. - No, no, no, he's one, well he's one to have. - Not saying when he is seven and he's at a birthday party, would you let him have a cupcake or a piece of cake? - What I would, what I am trying to do, so I would not be punitive because I think that leads, you know, that can lead to a lot of issues too, right? And a child does need to learn how to make their own decisions. What I would try to do, and I think what we should do for every child is training them from the early stage possible how dopamine runs our life, how for an adult, really we are rats in a cage going from dopamine head to dopamine head. We wake up, we check our phones, then we grab the coffee. You know, most huge portion of the internet bandwidth is porn, you know, we watch TikTok, we watch the TVs, we grab alcohol after work.

Why we're all mice in a cage (50:55)

Even at work, we have all these enterprise applications like Slack that are just triggering our dopamine. We literally are just mice in a cage running from dopamine head to dopamine head. And I think where we've been wronged and gas-lated a bit is that food has been normalized and we don't put it in that box. What's happened is there's highly addictive drugs and highly harmful drugs in our food. You know, if you actually wanna just take a scientific approach to analyzing the negative impacts of drugs, sugar would be at the top of the list. Sugar would be above heroines, methamphetamine, any other drug. If you attribute the deaths to sugar versus any other drug, it dwarfs it. You know, the fact that it doesn't, you know, immediately make you high like an opioid right away. It actually makes it more dangerous. It's more nefarious, but it's highly addictive. If you do brain scans, which they've done, of the dopamine receptors in your brain with sugar versus opioids, it triggers the exact same parts of the brain. Mark Hyman's talked a lot about this. - Yeah, I just wanna know if I can have a piece of cake at this person. - I had a huge goal to train, to talk to my kid about the journey I've been on about being disturbing. - So you're not gonna have a heart in fast. You will, you maybe haven't thought through what I could tell this is like, I'm not sure what to do a little to me. - I think that when you are a control of your child's diet, I do think it is wrong for sugar to touch their mouth. - Wow, so really hardcore. - No, no, but you're in charge of your child's diet, I think very early on. I don't think you're fully in charge of them. It's at seven. - Right. - My hope would be to train them about use this as an opportunity to talk about how society has been so wrong on things that are very normalized about how society used to say smoking is fine, a doctor's smoking offices. I mean, that would be my hope. I also think that, you know, if you go down the list, chronic stress management and people feeling, you know, independent and making their decisions is also extremely important. So the tactical implementation, but I think it's tough, but I do think we need a mindset shift on how we train kids and absolutely with babies.

How to set your kids up for success with diet (53:01)

I mean, you're starting your kid off really far ahead if you have a metabolically functional environment for the first couple of years. I mean, the degree of drugs and food that we're giving children right now really do, you know, set them back. It's damaging the microbiome. I really do think there's a lot of evidence in just common sense, you know, that sleep habits, that movement habits, that, you know, food habits, when you are in full control, you know, from zero, one, two, really have a huge impact. So I think you are setting your kid up for a lot of success there. And then for older kids, I think it's talking about this stuff. I think it's, I think drugs and don't mean run our lives and the fact that that's been weaponized into the food that we need to survive, I think it's a huge problem. All right, so I want to go back to subsidies. So we've got our seven year old kid. It's tough. You know, there's things at the birthday party that they're going to want that aren't good for them.

Why Quest's first recipe couldn't be manufactured (54:05)

This was the whole idea behind Quest. We wanted to make food that people could choose based on taste and how it'd be good for them. But one of the side effects that actually, one of the things that ended up making that company possible was a knock on effect of high fructose corn syrup. So when we first tried to make our bar, we went into a co-manufacturer, they said, this can't be made. They were like, why not? And they're like, the texture of it is just not going to run through the equipment. Why don't you add some high fructose corn syrup? And we couldn't understand that was everybody's response. And we're like, we get it from like a shelf stability standpoint. We get, even get it from a taste standpoint. But why can't you manufacture it? And what we ended up realizing is that for 70-ish years, the machinery that was being manufactured had been developed and locked up with the use of high fructose corn syrup, which gives everything a very particular viscosity. And so when it goes through a machine, if it doesn't have that in it, it just doesn't run properly. And so it was like, nobody thought about that. You're just, all the things that this machine has to make all have this high fructose corn syrup, which for people that don't know, it comes in almost like a syrup form. And so you put it into the whatever product and it gives it like a lot of pliability. And once we stripped it out, even though we also had our syrup, but ours was a fiber, it just didn't have the same properties. And so we ended up having to engineer our own equipment, which is pretty insane, but ends up being one of the reasons that the company is able to explode. So anyway, bringing this all back to subsidies. So it's like, what we were trying to do is say, hey, we're gonna do that painful work of negotiating with the almond growers and all this stuff to try to make something that is of reasonable cost that you don't have to deal with. We'll figure out the machinery, all that stuff. And we can just deliver a bar that is metabolically advantageous. So from a subsidy standpoint, how do we change the incentives so that healthy eating can happen accidentally, but is also still delicious? - This is my simple message.

Government lobbying. (55:55)

I think we've been lied to on policy as well that it's complicated. We need to stop recommending poison and stop subsidizing poison. And then the free market will figure it out. If like-- - So just make high fruit, just corn syrup cost what it costs. Stop recommending it, stop subsidizing it. Right now, the USDA, which sets the new Christian guidelines for Americans, the guidelines, what our government tells us is that a child that's two years old and up can have 10% of their diet added sugar, 10% of their diet. - Just for saying it. What's that? - It makes me wanna bite you that you're saying it. Like that's so crazy. - This is, I just wanna, 'cause again, I hear these things before but I guess kind of the government says for us, a child, two years and up to eat 10% added sugar. And the amount of lobbying that going into that and malfeasance that I saw is astounding. The key thing to understand with that USDA guideline, the key thing to understand with most medical decisions is that the USDA, the FDA, when they approve drugs or the NIH when they give guidelines like on for opioids and now for ozimpic, it's not government bureaucrats that are at the government making that determination. They're outside panels. So the way food companies-- - Is that better or worse? - I think it's worse because there's no conflicts of interest with who can go on those panels. So 95% of the experts on the USDA Nutrition Guidelines committee received personal payments from food and/or pharma companies. - Wow. - Dr. Fatima Stanford who we talked about who's the ozimpic show from Harvard, you can't even make this up, was just appointed at the 2025 committee to make the nutrition guidelines. - Wow. - The same person who says that obesity isn't tied to food or exercise. So that's the level of corruption. And then of course it's just revolving door with all these agencies, the classic case where the chair of the FDA got leave just went straight to be the board of Pfizer. So it's just like a total revolving door where there's no restrictions on not only research grants, which is the lifeblood of these academics industry, but personal consulting payments from processed food companies. So if there's like, we say, oh, it's complicated. Oh, patients don't wanna do this. We have the United States government saying 10% added sugar. - Didn't they, somebody the food compass says like, lucky charms or better, three times better than eggs or something like that? - Yeah, I think sometimes we think that this is a thing of the past. You know, we know about the food pyramid in the 90s where some corrupt research from the Sugar Research Council said we should be eating more sugar, more carbs, less healthy fats. - That's insane. - This is still happening. So not only do you have the guidelines bought off, you have the pre-eminent nutrition study today. Today is the food compass. So this is very classic. It's millions of dollars directly from the NIH, Tufts Nutrition School, which is one of the pre-eminent nutrition schools and also millions of dollars from processed food companies. They go into the same study. This study comes out on the press release. It says the purpose of the study is to impact childhood nutrition marketing guidelines. Point of the study. And it says that over three dozen name brand cereals, including lucky charms, honey net Cheerios on down, three dozen are recommended. Multiple's more than eggs, which are discouraged and beef, which is discouraged.

Corruption In Nutrition Sciences And Food-Related Health Issues

How food companies corrupt nutrition schools. (59:37)

Now this is funny if it wasn't tragic that the food companies think about this, right? The maker of that study, the Dean of Tufts Nutrition School, he actually called me very angry. It was actually, I'm like, geez, you don't have a lot to do. My partner and I, my new company, we're working to expose the stuff and change it. But it's just so ridiculous and people hadn't talked about the study. So what we put out went pretty viral. Joe Rogan tweeted about or Instagram did and Fox News started covering it. And he called me, he couldn't even make this up. He called me from Davos like fuming. He's like emails, but you need to pick up my call, it calls me. And he said that the food funding is the lifeblood of nutrition schools. And that just is what it is. And I asked him, 'cause I did some research, I said, well, you've received personal payments, not just research payment, personal payments from almost every processed food company, you can imagine. And another direct-to-consumer issuer of OZIMPIC, he is receiving payments, consulting payments from an OZIMPIC prescriber. One of these companies that's mass advertising in TikTok ads, OZIMPIC to millennials. That's who's paying him. That's who's paying for his vacation house in Massachusetts. And I asked him, just point blank, I think what everyone would want to ask him, does that impact your decision making? He's like, of course not, we have a disclaimer in the study. - The truth is hitting your career goals is not easy, you have to be willing to go the extra mile to stand out and do hard things better than anybody else. But there are 10 steps I want to take you through that will 100 X your efficiency, so you can crush your goals and get back more time into your day. You'll not only get control of your time, you'll learn how to use that momentum to take on your next big goal. To help you do this, I've created a list of the 10 most impactful things that any high achiever needs to dominate. And you can download it for free by clicking the link in today's description. All right, my friend, back to today's episode. - You know, the big process food company that even funded the food compass was Denon. You're like, you know, they don't, you know, they did take cereal money, but he's like, you know, Denon makes almond milk. I pull up the study, milk and dairy, chocolate almond milk is the highest rated dairy rated by the NIH Tufts food compass. It's higher rated than grass fed Greek yogurt, chocolate almond milk made by Denon. They're the number one maker of that. So, you know, it's just aggressive defense of asking us to believe what's just manifestly not true. And anything else has said, you know, we had some cereals low rated, but the fact that Cheerios is rated higher than quinoa in that study and honey nut, he's like, honey nut Cheerios is rated lower. It's like, yeah, but Cheerios is rated high and they take that study and I used to do this. You take that study and you go to the school boards. You go to the, you know, food stand. This is a lot of lobbyists are in the office. I'm hearing from members of Congress every day with these confusing study. There's been 50,000 nutrition studies conducted in just the past three years, according to PubMed. And the express goal of these studies is to confuse. It's to confuse. So what I would say is that, just getting back to the policy is we need to just be simple in our recommendations and have some moral courage. If the head of the NIH, you know, the head of the USDA, the Dean of Stanford Medical School, Harvard Med School, Tufts Nutrition School, if they had a press conference tomorrow on the steps of Congress and said, it is an urgent national priority to limit sugar among children specifically and stop recommending this.

Sugar & cigarettes (01:03:03)

And we need to make the USDA nutrition guidelines say zero sugar immediately. We don't want to ban it, but we don't recommend alcohol for children. We don't say 10% alcohol. We don't say 10% cigarettes. The only difference between what's sugar and cigarettes is that what sugar is doing to kids is an order of magnitude worse. It literally, I'm not saying they should take it, but like, like there's nothing worse that we can give kids to ensure that they have more metabolic disorders, more depression than sugar. I mean, it is a violent substance going back that word. And I just think, again, we have been so wrong so many times about things that were normalized throughout American history. This is a big one. If those leaders said that tomorrow, it would be a revolution. Americans listen to medical leaders. We actually adhered to the food pyramid, right? We dramatically changed our diet in the '90s, which was a disaster. In the 1980s, when the Surgeon General said smoking is bad, way too late, decades too late, because of similar cultural and economic reasons, smoking rates plummeted. And when Dr. Fauci said to get the vaccine, I think it's like 90% plus of Americans got at least one vaccine. So for better or worse, we listen to medical leaders. At those child's birthday party, right? If Dr. Fauci and all the other medical leaders say sugar is poison, it should be 0%. At that birthday party, it would be more taboo to give every child sugar like there are a bunch of meth heads. Now those parents who are giving all this sugar to the three-year-olds and all the children are running around like crazy people, that's what the government's recommending. It's literally their phone, so don't recommend things. And this is simple. This is simple. The second thing is the government should stop subsidizing, as I mentioned, through food stamps, through crop subsidies, 0.4% of crops have these go to fruit or vegetables, 0.4%. That's correct. 90% go to wheat, corn soy. Corn is obviously turned into hyperbrized corn syrup, and those are the staples of processed food from the 1970s. Let's just look for ways to stop subsidizing it. Has anybody looked at what that does to the availability of just enough calories to feed a family for people that are on snaps? Well, snap is Coke-wobbies for snap to be lowly funded too. So lowly funded. There's express lobbying from processed food companies to keep the snap contributions low so people can only afford processed food. Well, you're asking. No, that wasn't what I was asking, but it's even weirder.

Is there a worse food than nothing? (01:06:08)

So what I'm saying is let's say that-- so if we remove subsidies from the grains and stuff-- going back to my early, early devil's advocate, what if they're really just trying to make cheap calories available? Because honestly, even I really want people to be helping. I want them to eat whole food. But I would much rather people have Coke and terrible things and be alive than these calories just not be available and they're starving to death. Now, I have no idea that that could be so fake and it's not even an issue. And it'd be so easy to get them chicken breast and carrots, whatever. But I haven't looked at it. So that would be the one thing I would say, like has anybody looked-- is there anything that is-- it doesn't even have to be hyper-palatable, but is there anything palatable that we could make available on snaps so that when we get rid, we say no more subsidies that lead to Coke in the first place. And then even if people are going to keep making Coke, don't let it be purchasable with snaps. What do they eat then?

Gary Taubes: is fat the problem, or the symptoms? (01:07:10)

Yeah, I hate to do this, but I'm going to dispute a little bit of your premise. I literally have no idea. So I come from a libertarian early in my career work for Republicans, free markets and individual choice is really important to me. What we have right now is a total corruption of the system where we have $115 billion government program in the case of food stamps, lobby to basically subsidize and pay for poison, which then costs trillions of dollars of downstream health impacts. So if you change that, that's not messing with the market. That's correct in the market. If you said for a government nutrition program, it needs to be-- even cutting out those three ingredients, even saying it needs to be whole foods that-- or packaged foods that don't include seed oil, sugar, or higher-cost risk-grained people raise. You did that tomorrow. Tomorrow. Like tomorrow, you'd have Amazon and all these companies. That's fair. And there'd be Quest product. Like, if there's $115 billion pot of money and the rule of change, right now everyone's flooding into accomplice rules. Now when you go into a-- - 100%-- - Coca-Cola instructs all the supermarkets to do special campaigns around the days that SNAP funding comes into account. And a Coca-Cola is front and center and actually cheaper at a supermarket often than water because there's so many subsidized ingredients in that. So everyone's playing by the rigged rules of the game. But I just get to totally false choice. In Sweden, there's a huge emphasis for lower-income programs to encourage whole foods, farmers' markets. And there's farmers' markets in lower-income areas because that's where the money is. So we talk about this issue of food deserts. It's kind of this perversion of the thing. The NAACP plays into this. So like, well, these folks need Coke and they need processed food because there's food deserts. No, there's food deserts because of the corrupt policies that you were being paid to promote. Amazon and all these innovative companies would be in these places tomorrow if there were economic incentives to be there. So we have a rigged market. On the money thing, I do also dispute that, that this is too expensive. What's hard right now is, again, that health care's the largest and the fastest growing industry in the United States producing worse outcomes. In our industries, innovation is better prices, better service. It's the opposite and it's the largest industry in the country. So what's happening is these-- and I think conservatives actually are starting to understand this, the left. I think it's a bipartisanship of our time. But we are writing a check for our bankruptcy. I mean, the amount of budgetary devastation that we are embedding with a 30% childhood prediabetes rate-- I mean, just think about how much of a gold mine a diabetic child is for the health care system. Oh, god, that's a horrible one to say. It's a gold mine. No, no, no, no, no. That's the greatest thing possible and we're creating more of them through the incentives of the system. But what's so great about a diabetic child for the system-- We'll just clip that out of context. Let me tell you what's so great about a diabetic child.

Type 2 diabetes & PCOS (01:10:15)

It is-- well, diabetic children are both the greatest economic gift to the largest industry in the country and what's going to see, I think, the collapse of the United States because of the budgetary. Because the amazing thing economically about a diabetic child is they don't die. But they have growing comorbidities. So the second that child is the system, they are told by the American Diabetes Association, which is funded by diabetes drug makers and food companies, that this is a lifetime non-reversible condition. But that really winds me up when people say that. Yeah, diabetes is completely reversible. Diabetes, there's nothing medically significant about the blood sugar level of diabetes. It's an arbitrary marker of blood sugar. There's nothing scientifically like you've crossed the Rubicon when you have diabetes or pre-diabetes. It's completely under our control and completely reversible through food. If you do your simple program of moving and eating whole foods, like every other animal in the wild is able to do, you can reverse metabolic dysfunction and reverse diabetes. But so just think about that child.

Podcast in China (01:11:31)

That child enters the system. And if they're lower income, they're on Medicaid. So that child then is told this is lifetime conditions. And then when you have diabetes, you're just racking on the comorbidities. So that child is definitely, if it's a woman, going to have PCOS. PCOS, which is the leading cause of female infertility, is insulin resistance. It literally is a type. It's like a phase of diabetes. It's not caused or related to diabetes. Like insulin resistance, PCOS is the same thing. And now 25% of women have PCOS, which is skyrocketing. Male sperm count is plummeting, which is highly metabolically related. That child is going to obviously deal with obesity, most likely depression, be on an SSRI. Like 25% of adult women in the United States are on an antidepressant. So that child, as they grow and are told these are just things to manage, is just going to rack up all these comorbidities and just be a goal mind. And that sounds very morbid. But that is how it works. And it's tragic. Man, they say don't kill the messenger. But good, Laura, your message is god awful. This is-- it's funny because I've been in this space for a long time. But this is really like hearing it like this.

Food Science And Grassroots Support

Money behind food science (01:12:52)

I've heard people rail like, you got to get the money. The politics. I never really understood what they meant. But this is-- I thought they meant campaign donations. But now I'm realizing that this is a far more gnarly setup. Well, the food industry spends 11 times more nutrition research than the NIH. And the NIH itself is able to obviously give to-- it's basically a grant-making organization that gives two folks with conflicts of interest. So it's rigging institutions of trust. It's, as we talked about, rigging the research institutions. Do you really see a way out of this? Because this is now you-- what? Because if all the incentives are there and people are throwing money, you would have to-- you'd have to get the money out of big food. I'm a little bit upset you're feeling despondent. This is an optimistic message. There are not podcasts like this in China where folks are ranting against the incentives of the largest industries in the country. In the leading books, the leading podcasts, people are waking up. And I do think one of the strengths of our system in America is that we are able to robustly debate and make course corrections. And what does give me hope from the bottoms up, I do think people want to be healthy, want to be at their kids' weddings, want to see their grandchildren, want their kids to be healthy. So I think there's a lot of education. And my message, my contribution to this debate is that when it comes to chronic conditions, preventing them specifically for you or your children, you should listen to the medical system, but you should not trust it. You should trust yourself. And how do I listen to the system and not trust it at the same time? You can listen to what the American Academy pediatrics says to feed your children and then read a book by Mark Hyman or Robert Lustig. And do the opposite. You can-- This is the optimistic part of the pitch? No, it is optimistic. In order to be empowered, in order to be empowered, we need to have a baseline of what's happening. Knowledge about the game we're playing in is required for empowerment. People can do their own thing. That is all I hear. The system, though, is going to eat a huge percentage of the people. From the top down, this is how I see it. This is the biggest existential threat we have to America. We are truly becoming a fat, infertile, sick, depressed population at an increasing rate. Like if you've seen the movie "Wally," we're truly coming that. Also, this will-- This is a violent-- everything's political. Listen, we'll kill. But what gives me hope from a top down perspective is things that are unsustainable by definition have to stop eventually. Yeah, but in how much pain and agony? We generally get to the right answer late, but we do get to the right answer, and I do think it's a strength of our system. I think we have completely lost our way. There's been a complete lapse of moral courage from leaders. But let's just even take what I was talking about earlier, how the medical miracles were all pre-1960 acute. We did achieve great things in the medical system. We have double life expected through, I think, these acute innovations. We've lost our way with these management of chronic conditions. There's addiction to that. The recurring revenue, which our system is addicted to now. We're aggressively calling it out right now. It's mathematically unsustainable, because the more we spend the worse things get, and we're going to go bankrupt. So it has to be a bottoms up revolution. I mean, I actually do get hope that the most popular pieces of content are about this, that there's an awakening. My message is the system is rigged. You should trust yourself, and it's simple. It is simple. Cut those three ingredients, move, see what happens. It's simple. Like don't be gas-lighted that this is complicated. I've seen the efforts inside the system to try to convince you of that, and it's just not true. This is dead simple. That is my message. And if more and more people can wake up, the system changes to the top down. And I'll just say lastly-- - You mean the system changes to the bottom up?

The power of grassroots support (01:17:08)

- I'll give this example. I was meeting with a member of Congress and asked them about money. And the money's huge. The farm industry spends five times more on lobbying and public affairs work in the oil industry. Three times more than any other industry. It's huge. There's three farm lobbyists for every member of Congress. - What's you saying that again? - There's three farm lobbyists for every member of Congress. So it's significant. - Yeah. - What he told me is that the only thing more powerful than money is grassroots support, is voters caring about an issue. And that's why abortion, and that's why gun control, things that are very targeted people very passionate about. And what he said, and what I do see, is that people are being channeled and becoming very passionate about the fact that there is violence occurring to kids. I really do think, and it's a tried-and-true political dynamic, but kids are under threat right now. Like you go into a click-heads classroom, you see the developmental issues, you see the obese, you see the metabolic conditions. Like when you think about a voter, when you think about a voter and what they care about, this is channeling a lot of attention and rage, and more and more people are talking about this at meetings and calling. And these members of Congress also have kids, and they basically are somewhat gas-lighted, and they're not really controlling anything and kind of in the system as created by the interests. But the grassroots support is growing, and one thing I'm trying to do is channel that. And I would say the more you can make your voice known that this rigged system is an issue, the more effective, and we're working with some folks on channeling that attention, but if there is a grassroots uprising to protect kids and reverse these trends we're seeing, that will also help. - How dare you, Kelly? Incinuate that my morbidly obese child with Type 2 diabetes is not perfect. That's body shaming, and I, you should be fired, defunded, you should, any sponsorships you ever get, any likes on Twitter, I'm going after all those people. What say you to body positivity? - I think it's the exact same tactics that I saw 10 years ago when I was working for these companies. I think that the average American who's overweight wants to be less overweight, they want to be healthy. I think we've been sold this bill of lies that you can cater to a matter. - I think that's true, I think that's the secret. I really do believe everybody would feel better about themselves and would just feel better like my joints don't hurt if they lost weight, but that is not the rhetoric. The rhetoric is from some percentage, maybe it's 1%, maybe it's 99%, but there is violent rhetoric about body positivity, not shaming people for being overweight, et cetera, et cetera. - If I want to trigger people, all I have to do is start talking about weight loss. - Let's go back to the framework of rigging institutions of trust.

Influence of food companies to promote irresponsible messaging about body weight (01:20:08)

The LA Unified School District, the largest school district in the country, recently posted on their Instagram account, a video from a body, influential, body positive influencer. And the video said it is racist to stigmatize any food. That the only reason you should criticize a donut is if the donut has mold on it. And that it is a result of longstanding oppression for us to be judging what people eat. You cannot make this up, I post about this on Twitter. - I don't follow how that's racist. - So that video was paid for by Nestle. That they funneled money to that body positive influencer. And it's come out that food companies are funneling millions of dollars to influencers, particularly on TikTok, to make this argument that any talk of food is fat shaming. And there's also been a movement on TikTok. - So you think it's real, you think it's just being incentivized. - The debate is being weaponized. Like where is this information coming from? Like where are these ideas now that it's racist for a doctor to weigh a patient, which is now a thing, doctors aren't weighing patients. - It's time to race. - This is the playbook, there are viral TikTok videos that are, the influencer funded by food companies. This has come out that are systematically arguing that it's racist to weigh patients. - But why, I don't understand the tie to race. So I think-- - 'Cause they tie, you just watched this video that the LA Unified, but they tie the fact that communities of color are have higher rates of obesity. - Got it. - They make that connection, so they add a race in there. - But if everybody's weighed, is it the judgment against being heavy? Like if people were saying the judgment against being obese is racist, then at least okay, if it's disproportionate, the people of color are obese, then okay. I at least under, I obviously think it's insane, but I understand there's a direct connection to be made. But just, I don't know, I don't wanna get lost in a wide way, but it's just weird. - The healthy at any size movement is absolutely weaponized. - Do you think that the argument was there and then it got co-opted? Because that's my impulse. Like I've talked to enough people directly, people that I know and love, and it's not somebody from the outside influencing them. It's that they are deeply insecure about it. And so when you bring it up, it brings this wave of shame, and so it makes them wanna push back. And so there are very few things that are more triggering than your body is less valuable than another body. I think humans have an algorithm that runs inside their brain getting to us by evolution that makes you deeply concerned about how your body is perceived. And so the second, regardless of color, the second that you make somebody feel like your body is inferior to somebody else's, you are in for an emotional backlash. - I wanna take it two levels real quick. One is absolutely this idea that's being propagated from the top down that you could be healthy at any size, which is a lie, and kind of the pitchforks around anyone saying that being obese is probably not good for health. There's a systematic effort. That is being orchestrated very systematically, just like the donations to the NAACP, just like paying researchers when I was working for new companies or opioid researchers to say, "Oh, we should relax the standards." It's a similar playbook to make the debate toxic and basically shut down debate about this issue, which helps from an individual standpoint of people you know, people we know being very sensitive to this issue. I think it's because I actually feel for them. The system has been rigged against them. I think saying anything about it being their fault, again, I'm a free market individual liberty guy, but the fact that 80% of adults now are overweight or obese, there's clearly something systematic happening. So I think there actually is rightful apprehension from folks that are overweight feeling blamed. And my message is, I really actually, I've evolved on this, it's not their fault. Like I actually think this is hopefully one thing that's resonating about what we're talking about is that you're being told, and I think it actually is, in the various interests of rigged institutions, saying it's your fault that it's you being lazy. Humans haven't gotten systematic elaser in the past 40 years when all these things are skyrocketed. So I think actually, this is why I hope this discussion is a little bit empowering, actually just embracing the baseline that it's actually not your fault. And you actually should be a little bit upset of any type of blaming, because the system is basically screwed you through $4 trillion of the healthcare system that makes money when more people are sick, and then the $6 trillion food industry that's making people sick. So there's a lot of things landed against you. My message is, let's embrace that, right? And I think embracing that is even a little bit of road to empowerment, it's not your fault, but you have to take actions as an individual to fight against these interests that are against you. And I think eventually we need to channel attention as a country to this existential issue.

On obesity as a symptom of a metabolically unsustainable lifestyle (01:25:39)

So yeah, that's where I see the frustration. I think people don't like to be blamed and don't like to be told they're lazy 'cause I really think they're not. I think where I draw the line is we need to talk very clinically without blaming people that obesity is the result of a metabolic disaster and not obfuscate what it is. I think a big problem with how we talk about obesity too is actually delineating is the problem in and of itself to solve. Obesity is a symptom of the tree. It's a branch of the tree, but it's one of many branches, diabetes and heart disease. It's the branch of the metabolic dysfunction. Right, right. And we're trying actually to be told systematically right now that it's one condition siloed to cure with a specific pill. It's actually just one symptom. It's not in and of itself the problem. It's just a visual symptom. It's actually potentially one of the better symptoms. Metabolic dysfunction insulin resistance, some people's fat cells actually are insulin resistant themselves and they don't really gain a lot of weight. But then you can get fatty liver disease. You can get invisible symptoms. So that's what I'd say. It's just like to your friends and to people that are sensitive. It's not their fault. I really do think this system is rigged against them. I agree. I think this system is rigged against them. I have a weird relationship with the phrase fault. It's all your fault. That's one of my favorite things that I like to remind myself because it puts me in the driver's seat and I can do something about it. And if I look at it and I'm like, I'm a victim of the system, well then I'm stuck.

Owning your own health (01:27:17)

And I actually do, God, this is gonna be horrible because trust me, I started this show because I have so much love for people and I wanna help people. And I really, really do believe that people are victimized by a lot of stuff, but you can't allow yourself to be a victim. So it's like you've got to find your way out of it. And I say that as somebody who loves and cares about you and wants to see good things for you, but it's like you are gonna have to fight. The system is no one's coming to save you. And once you understand that nobody's coming to save you, not even Callie who's gonna do his best and lobby the government and get all this stuff turned around. But it's like if you act as if nobody's coming to save you, you take ownership of this stuff and you make change. Dude, what you can do with your life is extraordinary. But you said something earlier that we haven't gotten lazier. I think we have gotten lazier. Because if you break somebody's metabolic machinery, they cannot help but get lazy. A and B, I do think that as an empire declines at the risk of derailing this entire conversation that Elon Musk said this really well. He was like, I have factories in China and I have factories here. And he's like, man, when I look at how people work in China, it is insane. Like these guys work hard. Now you can judge that and say that's ridiculous and they're wasting their life and they're working too hard and that's just bad and we should never aspire to that. Okay, fair enough. But they're like, it's gonna be tough being more chill, being more relaxed to out compete people that are going hard. And the reality is the world is one big competition. I understand we don't want it to be, but the reality is that it is. And so people are from a world economic power perspective. China has come out of nowhere and not nowhere, but like very rapidly, they have caught up and look like they're going to surpass us. And I think people think that that has no consequences, that will have consequences. And if the thing that we all say is it's not your fault, you're not to blame for anything, like fill in the blank for your weight, for your depression, for your anxiety. And again, I'm with you, man. Like the food system is messing them up and it's like, I'm totally cool. I don't need to cling on to the word, it's your fault. Fine, it's not your fault, you're here. But now it, the only one that's going to drive you to fulfillment, to love, to satisfaction, joy, power, accomplishment is you. And if you can buckle into that seat, like with excitement of like, oh man, cool. Hey, it's really, I'm super upset that all the weird decisions and subsidies and all that have ended me here, where my mom had gestational diabetes while she had my mom smoked. And I'm still, I'm just convinced that I would be far smarter with a better memory of my mom and smoke during pregnancy. But the reality is she did, and she grew up in a time where it's like smoking is good for you. And so I can be annoyed about that, or I can buckle in and say, I have the hand that I was dealt, it is what it is, and now it becomes a question of what do I do with it? How do I play this hand? And so I am just beseeching people. It's like, you can change, you can make any change you want. None of us get to be as cool as we want to be. I wanna be more talented entrepreneur than Elon Musk. The odds are stacked against me. He is very far ahead of me, and pulling farther ahead by the day. But I can 100x my abilities is how I look at it. And so I don't want people to, I don't want people to beat themselves up. I want them to find self love, and I think that's very important, but I wanna be very clear that you can only find self love by doing the things that you think are worthy of respect. And if you don't decide what you think is worthy of respect, and then do those things, you will never earn your respect, you will never love yourself, you cannot stare in a mirror and say, I love myself, I love myself, I love myself. And so we get to the point where people are obese, they are being a little lazy. And even though they have the deck of stacked against and bad things have happened to them that are not their fault, but like focusing on that it's not my fault part instead of that I can do something about it is where I think we lose people. Here's what I worry about just to add to that. Is the empowering message I'm trying to give is you do have a lot of control and to not defer to the system. I think the problem in America, as we talked about a little bit earlier, is that you got to defer to institutions in something. You can't like think, I'm like an average person, could just question everything. But the systems themselves, it's like, what basically is happening right now with health as Americans are following the incentives as laid out? We subsidize and encourage terrible food and then health currently kicks in once you're sick to manage the condition, which makes everyone money is recurring revenue. So it's not like you're screwed or don't have agency. I think it's like, I do think it is, if you take polls at Gallup of different institutions, like people still trust the doctors and the medical system. And it's just like, so it's actually like an empowering message of like, you really can take it in your own hands. I mean, when I think about now with my son and with my eating and my habits, you know, I was never graded exercise. But I almost see it as like this, this action against the system, a subversive action. I actually think exercise is bullshit. Like exercise never needed to happen. We didn't have like gyms until like a couple decades ago, right? This used to all be part of normal life. We used to be out in the cold. We didn't need cold punching. We used to just move for our lives, right? And we used to just like, weren't sedentary and kids would be moving. And the exercise, food, natural food used to be an important thing. We used to be outside, you know, getting the sun on our skin. Like all of these like kind of tech bro expensive habits and protocols that we're talking about, they're kind of almost caricatured, used to just be part of our biological needs that we just got from normal life. So I actually do think it's kind of BS that we have to like pay extra and you know, go to a gym. We never used to do that. So I've actually have like like indignation about it. Like I don't like going to the gym. - Let me say this. - But it's like, it's almost like this subversive act. It's almost like this price we have to pay for modern society, you know, but you just go down the list, the air peer fires, the water fields, like we spend so much money and a lot of the folks on your, just talking about really extra money and time to get back to our biological needs that were never a problem. I just think that's what I'm trying to advance forward a little bit is like, it's not even all bad. I mean, I mean, I enjoy living in a city. I enjoy, you know, having electricity but our circadian rhythms being totally screwed. You know, the lights are a very new invention. You know, our body is biologically on a 24 hour cycle because the sun, the sun used to be everything. This is not pseudoscience or friend stuff. I mean, you know, we were going to sleep when the sun went down and on a cycle. So I don't want lights or these things to go away but we just need to understand that we've gone a little out of whack and these industries have become so big, you know, we've been gaslight a little bit. So it's like building that baseline of understanding, I think is important for empowerment. And then I know I think I just double click on it. It's just like, don't be convinced by anyone that it's complicated. You know, just start moving, just start, just start, you know, being a little bit more curious about food. I think the average person in this country is just beaten over the head not to be curious about what they put in their body. You know, we have this 75% ultra process diet. I mean, even just getting on the road to curiosity, I think it's a big step up for you and your family and going on to blog post, it's just a rabbit hole. That I think as a matter of public policy, we should be encouraging people to be on, but also from the bottom is up.

The next food/farming movement (01:35:19)

- I'm not a policy guy. I'm never inspired by that. I think that it is very good that something people are and I encourage anybody that's listening to this. If you're a rage against the machine kind of person, please go rage against the machine 'cause this is all crazy. But I want to now talk about innovation. So one thing we were talking about before we started rolling is what's gonna be that next big movement in food. You were talking about regenerative agriculture. There's two parts of this that I want to get into. One, just what is regenerative agriculture? And then as we think about scaling, what do you think about artificial? It's not technically artificial meat, but meat cells grown in the lab. - So I believe regenerative agriculture is one of the most important worldwide trends of the next 10 to 20 years.

Regenerative Agriculture And Food System Impact

What is regenerative agriculture? (01:36:10)

- And for people that don't know what it is, break it down for them. - We have a monocroping system where because of the subsidies, crops are, we have fields of wheat, fields of corn. They're all one. We have industrial pens and crates for cows. We do everything separately, which is the result of a lot of the agriculture incentives. That's a new phenomenon in the past 60 years. That's never how farming has been for history. Farming has been that there's been a lot of experimentation where animals are raised near the plants, that the manure helps fertilize the plants, that the complex ecosystem of everything together actually provides a natural pesticide, that farmers were experimenters to figure out what animals should be near what plants and how all these ecosystems meld together to produce better output and to basically almost create natural pesticides. We haven't had artificial pesticides until very recently. This is like experimentation doctors. Doctors were like scientists and we've totally gotten away from that. It's absolutely decimated our soil. So we actually need pesticides because there's not such a complex ecosystem now, right? We need pesticides. And now as we know, right 90% of Americans, if you test their pee, have glyphosate in it. You know, we have thousands, thousands of chemicals in the United States right now that are banned in Europe. Again, I'm kind of an American. I don't like complimenting Europe too much, but this is not a free market that we have thousands of neurotoxins in our food. It's the result of a totally rigged market. If you really go down the rabbit hole of what is allowed to be sprayed and put in our food, it is a scandal. They're true neurotoxins. This is the result and downstream of our industrial farming, which again started with good intentions to reduce hunger and have stabilized food prices, but is the predominant way we farm in America.

The Omicron Variant and General Fear or Insecurity (01:38:18)

So there's two movies I'd say, The Biggest Little Farm and Kiss the Ground. Unbelievable life-changing documentaries on regenerative farming and what they show. And this is pretty indisputable, that we have 40 crop cycles left. Is that 40 years? About, I think it's 40 years. I think it's 40 harvests left where our soil is becoming so nutrient depleted with the monocropping. And what is happening now is that a tomato, for instance, in the United States today, in key nutrients, is 90% less than a tomato grown 50 years ago. It's substantially less nutrients than a tomato grown in like Sardinia, Italy, which is one of the blue zones. So we actually right now, our food is becoming less nutrient dense and our soil, which is, you know, I used to think these things were all hippy, but this is what, this is like the life form that produces our food and produces the nutrients that, you know, transfer from the world into food into our bodies. It's getting decimated. So we have this problem, right? We have a problem where we're all getting metabolic dysfunctional, where rates of everything are going up because our food is poisoned, I believe. And that's a problem. So you gotta ask how to solve that problem. And some folks say, well, we need to create fake meat. You know, we know about the beyond burger. I mean, that's been pretty much, pretty much, I think, delegitimized. But there's also this artificial, I hope so. I mean, I mean, impossible burgers is processed pea protein smothered in canola oil. - I mean, it's literally canola oil. Going back to seed oil, gonna be deeply problematic. - Yeah, it's a-- - I also ate one, not knowing that I had canola oil until just now. And it spiked my blood sugar like ice cream. - Yeah, it is, if you look at the ingredients, it's processed lab-grown low-quality proteins smothered in natural flavors and canola oil. So this goes back to what we're talking about, with the carnivore vegan, look at the components of food. If a glass of water is here and a glass of water with arsenic is here, you'd say that's bad. You can separate the arsenic and the water. With food, we don't even think it's individual components. And beyond burger and possible burger, franken food processed, meats, mothered in inflammatory oils and natural flavor. It's like, that's not what we're evolutionary designed. So I don't care if you're a vegan or carnivore, that crap, processed crap, throw that out the window. Then you get into what you talked about where there's actually, they're like, almost like a lab growing like meat. I'm not trying to be a Luddite here, but I think that the future is using technology to get back to basics. I don't think it's progress that we've totally messed with birth now and have close to a 40% C-section rate, that we are lab growing food. What I would prefer and what's happening is, as I said, we're gendered by agriculture. And they talk about this in the documentaries I mentioned, actually can produce the same or better outputs, crop outputs. In terms of yield? Yield. And they're a carbon sink because everything's flowing together. And it actually, the soil actually brings the cows and the methane, it brings it back into the soil. And there's crazy productivity, 'cause now what regenerative farmers are using is they're using AI, as I said, they're scientists. 'Cause they can run a bunch of different tests. What food should be grown next to each other? Right? What animals support what crops? They're constantly, the biggest little farm, unbelievable documentary on Disney Plus. They're experimenters. And you can actually use technology to figure out how to increase output through regenerative farming. So I like that use of technology, but growing an artificial chicken in a lab, it just doesn't meet the threshold of the fact that what I think we've lost our way is getting away from our biological needs. It's like we're animals that are millions of years in the making. And we, as I said, grew up with the sun, right? We evolved with the sun. There was no travel. We were in one place and we had a circadian rhythm with the sun. We ate natural food. We experienced wide ranges of temperatures. You know, from night we were outside our whole lives. So we had these, we're not gonna out-hack that. We're not gonna look back in 100 years at today and think we knew anything about human biology. The key thing we need to use technology for is getting back to basics on human biology. So I'm not a big fan of Frank & Finn Mead or lab-grown Mead. I would say how do we empower farmers and incentivize farmers and incentivize the people that make our food and give them the tools to get back to creating the one ton of genetic information that we put on our bodies, making sure that is, that is good. It's so basic, but it's just like we need to get back to better food.

How Our Broken Food System Impacts All of Our Lives (01:44:03)

We shouldn't be trying to out-hack that. And then you talk about the money. You know, we're gonna go bankrupt from the downstream effects of our broken food system. I know that we can figure this out and I think technology has a role. Two other quick things for technology. I think the BioWarebell Revolution is real and it's gonna supplant the doctor's office. I think we're low on this curve, but I think the fact that a sensor's gonna know your glucose has levels does, my sister's company now or eventually many other biomarkers, that through AI can actually tell you what you should be. It can actually tell you that you're gonna get heart disease in four years if you don't start doing X, Y, and Z. It can actually tell you when to drink water. It can actually give you brain chronic diseases to the current day and actually tell you what's gonna happen if you don't exercise. I think the perfect world we're in is drugs at a last resort, but just understanding how this genetic information food and our metabolic habits impact our lives. It can actually- - Well, you blew past genetic information food. - I call food genetic information. It's one ton of genetic information. It is your atoms from the world that brought into food that is literally the fuel for our bodies. I mean, it's- - But why genetic? You saying that there's genetic signaling going on? 'Cause I've often thought of food as signaling molecules. So it is literally communicating something to the cells in your body and some macronutrients say to do one thing and other macronutrients say to do something else. Is that what you mean? - Food is the fuel for our cells. Food is the most important determinant of life. I mean, I just think we lose how vital food is. I think the fact that food is brought into this kind of niche category of lifestyle medicine is crazy. I mean, food determines everything in our body and I think we need to get back to that. - Now, when you say the one ton of genetic information, you're talking about the genes in the food or are you talking about the way that we're designed to respond to food? - It's instructing our body what to do. I mean, I think every impulse of our body, every code in our body is made to be powered by food and I just think it's the most important thing to power our body.

Adaptation to glucose hormonal and addiction relating (01:46:15)

- So that reaction to me, I think is really important, which is what is going wrong with the foods that we eat, which I'll round to inflammation. - Yeah. - So talk to me about, like when we were talking about canola oil, we're talking about the everything being downstream of metabolic problems, what is it about the food that we're eating that is so pro-inflammatory? - So I think it's about the mitochondria. So the mitochondria goes off, is fueled off of fat or glucose, okay? And we're eating 100 times more sugar than we did 100 years ago. So what's happening is that's being pushed out of the mitochondria. And what obesity is, is basically the physical result of energy overload. So back in the day, before the past 50 years of our ultra-processed diet, it was actually good to have a little bit of excess glucose at certain period of time. So humans are actually made to, hibernate to some degree. Like evolutionarily, we're made to store some excess energy as fat. And we actually are made to go potentially weeks without eating. So I think that's very key. There's been some books about this. Nature wants us to be fat and drop acid by poor mutter. And so there's actually this biological need when we see high sugar fruit, fructose and fruits, to actually eat as much as we possibly can. Like evolutionarily, when you saw that, you're actually were well-instructed and well-advised to eat as much as you can. And then it's a whole another subcategory, but then fructose, of course, has been processed. And that's the type of sugar that's in most of our food, the high fructose corn stuff. It's a special type of sugar that actually makes us want to eat more. So throughout history, right, and our mitochondria is made to do, it kicks out, it's powered by the glucose, kicks out the excess glucose, and that actually turns into fat and is stored as fat. And then our body shifts into fat burning mode and uses that as energy. Humans today go through a lifetime without shifting into fat burning energy 'cause we're constantly at a fed state constantly eating glucose. And it takes, as you go into the research on the keto diet and fasting and stuff, it takes about 24 hours. If you're in a high glucose state to shift into that fat burning mode, humans literally go through not once entering that mode. So I think in that sense, the energy, it kind of makes sense. It kind of makes sense to actually load up a surplus. But we're literally just, it's backlogging. It's backlogging and that's causing insulin resistance and that's causing metabolic dysfunction. - That was one of the things when we brought up fat earlier that, so while fat is potentially one of the better results that you can have to metabolic dysfunction because you've got your body actually saying, "Okay, I'm gonna take this glucose out of the bloodstream. "I'm gonna store it as fats, "better than leaving it in the bloodstream, "which can cause all kinds of problems." But fat is also an endocrine organ. And so it starts secreting hormones, which then can make you more insulin resistant, which can make it more difficult for you than to lose the fat. So the more fat that you put on, the harder it can become to lose the fat. And so now you get into this very problematic cycle where it really does become harder and harder to shake that. And then on top of that, you factor in the microbiome, that your microbiome is gonna adapt to whatever you're eating. So if you're eating things that are making you insulin resistant and your microbiome is then screaming out for more of that food that is making you insulin resistant, now you're really in a death loop. And so getting out of that, and this is actually going back to one of the human things that I hear a lot, which is that there are people that are pushing back on the food emotionally, right? Food is such a huge driver of dopamine to your earlier point. They feel like I ought to be able to eat this. Like it's not fair that I can't eat this thing. I wanna eat this thing. It makes me feel the way that I wanna feel in the short term. And so they get into this loop of, you have an emotional sense of, I ought to be able to eat this. It's unfair that I can't, that people are telling me I'm not supposed to, that's making me fat, whatever. Then you're putting on adipose tissue, and you're changing your microbiome. So you talked about the unholy trinity earlier. I'll say that's the unholy trinity that I think a lot about, is when people get into that decline, then it becomes very hard to pull out of that. So the last thing I'll say on that is then that's where you get into this. Ultimately, yes, I get it hard to hand-delt to you. Other people have done things that have contributed very substantively to the condition that you now find yourself in. But unfortunately, to reverse out is going to require that you do some things that are going to be uncomfortable. Because when your microbiome is crying out for McDonald's and Coca-Cola, it isn't fun to drink water and eat chicken breast and broccoli. - I think we have an addiction issue in this country, and we need to think of food through that. I think you make a really good turkey. - It's the only drug you need addicted to that you can't cut cooked turkey. - Yeah, I think you make a really, really good point. I had a very interesting experience not eating for seven days. - Whoa. - And water only?

Breaking your addiction (01:52:00)

Water only, water and coffee. - Coffee with cream? - I put a little bit of almond milk in the coffee. That's about it. That's about it. And I decided to do this from reading a crazy stat that the longest healthy fast ever, with some multivitamins, but other than that, just water, it was like over 300 days. - Yep. - And that just shocked me, right? 'Cause we've been totally bred to think, you know, you've got to eat three meals a day. - He was morbidly obese. - More but the obese. - Make sure that we cover that. - More but the obese. - But yet all of his biomarkers improved very healthy, very long afterwards. And that just shocked me. More but the obese, most folks couldn't do that. But you know, most humans can go weeks and actually be relatively, I think Mr. Beast did a video where he did like 16 days or something. - Is aiming for like 20 years? - Yeah, I did like 16. - So, yeah. - But that just, it was radical to me. And I'll say that just psychologically, I didn't feel hunger. I felt addiction withdrawals. - Interesting. - I felt addiction withdrawals. - I did a five day fast, water only, truly water only. - Yeah. - And I would never do a seven day fast because my business slowed down so much. The first two days are fine. Day three starts to get dicey. By day four, I feel like I have the flu and it is not fun. - So for me, days two, three into four were rough and then it was amazing. - I never got to the amazing part. - I think this has been some writing on this and some of the fasting books I've been reading, but it was like euphoria and great productivity towards the end. I had a dinner party planned and it was almost like this boredom. Like it was so interesting. - Yeah, fair to your point about addiction. - It was so interesting. It was like just habit. And I think that's just acknowledging that. I mean, we don't have as much, thankfully, a hunger problem, but we have an addiction problem based on addictive food and I just, it gets to the spiritual question. It's just like, this is not good.

American civilization (01:54:17)

Like as an American civilization, you talk about kind of thinking about top down, thinking about China, thinking about American competitiveness, it's like the economy is inputs and we've got very increasingly sick, addicted population in this addiction. This fact that as we talked about our cells are being overloaded with glucose, that's causing insulin resistance, which is highly related to a lot of mental issues. If your triglycerides to HDL ratio goes up, for each point it goes up, your chance of depression goes up 90%. This is a ratio that a lot of doctors talk about as the key kind of indicator of insulin resistance. But there's a ton of data showing how tied insulin resistance, diabetes is to depression. It's like the inputs in the economy are just individuals and each of those individuals has a body and a brain that's perceiving the world and making decisions and determining their happiness, which is the end result of what we should be trying to do with public policy. It's like we're systematically destroying that. It's like there's a lot of complicated public policy elements, but I just think we've got to talk about our food crisis in terms of an addiction crisis to kind of start unwinding this expectation. As you said, it's like this expectation that everything we eat needs to be highly processed, that everything we eat needs to kind of feed this addiction, that it's taking something away if we don't do that. I think that's a real problem. And it should be like the opioid crisis. I mean, we really have an addiction problem. - That's a really interesting way to look at it. I saw a tweet that you did that showed you pan from the Coca-Cola, I think it was in a CVS, you pan from the Coca-Cola to the diabetes treatment that they offered and you were like, oh, it's a closed loop system. And it's a bit like the guy selling you fentanyl is also selling you Narcan or whatever it is, the overdose medication. And so it's like he wins either direction. - It's a conflict of interest. I mean, you look at the financial reports of CVS, a huge driver of their revenue is obviously selling pharmaceuticals, but a huge part of that is diabetes management, as we talked about, $4, $20 in healthcare, well over $20 to that is tied to diabetes. And then I would say 90% of that entire budget is loosely tied to diabetes because blood sugar to regulation is the underpinning kind of branch of many of the other chronic conditions. I mean, it's really the foundation. I'm helping my sister, Casey Means, write a book about this. I mean, it truly is like the paradigm of the chorothecis. - That metabolic health is the lens we need to view every health issue from, that it is a complete scandal that we have 42 medical departments. It is a book claiming that a metabolic view of health is the new framework for how we need to shift medicine to and offering systematic and bottoms up tips on how to do that.

Artificial Fragrances

Artificial Fragrances (01:57:21)

But we have to get to that view and the CVS thing, I mean, it is absolutely unconscionable and just kind of Orwellian walking to the front of the street. I actually walked down every aisle. I mean, it is like every item in a CVS is either loaded with substances that only train you that hurts ourselves or is like an inductor, disruptor, or is somehow, harming an environment of toxin that's also harming our metabolism. I mean, there's a whole row of artificial air fresheners. - Those are bad? - Absolutely, air fresheners. There is a crazy rabbit hole on the artificial fragrances. - Whoa. - Those air fresheners. - Like perfumes as well. - Absolutely. - Artificial, so you go down the rabbit hole on artificial fragrances, it's a huge, huge problem. I mean, I used to thinking again, you start going down this rabbit hole, it's like, oh my gosh, everything is screwed. - You know, it's crazy. - I asked my wife not to wear perfume because it gives me a headache. My whole life, incense, perfumes, candle stores, I can't, I can't be in them. - They're highly problematic. And that row at CVS with all those artificial air purifiers, a lot of the items in those are also abandoned. - Air purifiers. - You know, the things you plug in that, you know, release the sense. - Oh, right, right. - There's like a huge-- - Air fresheners. - As I say, I have an air purifier. - Air purifiers, yeah, yeah, yeah. The air fresheners. - Got it. - But you go down that aisle, there's a whole aisle for this. Then you go down the aisle of cleaning supplies and personal care products. You know, these things, again, we, I'm reluctant to say this because it gets into like really every part of our lives, you know, being, some we need to be concerned about. But I've turned the corner on that a little bit. I think we really should be concerned about the trajectory we're going on. And I think from seeing it, the lack of regulation and oversight is unprecedented in America. Like, again, it goes to like trusting.

Public Policy

Public Policy (01:59:51)

Like we kind of trust that these companies have our best interests at heart. We trust probably the government regulates it. For a lot of these personal care products, it's self-policing, it's self-regulation. There's actually not even a lot of testing. Like the amount of chemicals that are allowed in our deodorants, in our shampoo, in our air fresheners, it is a scandal. And, you know, we wonder why sperm count is plummeting. We wonder why, you know, could there be a bigger signal that something is off than our evolutionary, like core function of reproduction is like falling off a cliff? It's like there couldn't be a bigger warning sign. Like fertility issues are like skyrocketing right now. And that's a lot of that is tied to the hormone disruptors in, you know, good on the whole rabbit hole here. But yeah, the CVS, the front of the store, almost to the item is something that disrupts our metabolism. And then the back of the store, you know, 85, 90% of the revenue in healthcare is tied to cleaning up the mess of preventable metabolic dysfunction. So, how do you unwind that? I think knowledge is one thing, but we've got to examine this as a society. I'm with you 100%. I think complaining about public policy is kind of a waste of time, but we've got to, we've got to at least understand the problem. - Thanks. Callie Means, where can people follow you? - Callie Means on Twitter, tweeting a lot of what I do there and I'm starting a company TrueMed.com to change these incentives. - I love it. All right, everybody, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care, peace. - Click here to see the biggest lies about weight loss. - And so the idea of relying just on calories as a weight loss tool has been shown to be flawed in numerous controlled trials because eventually your body wins.