Ask Dr. Drew - Sharyl Attkisson: NYT Reports $10m “Puberty Blocker” Researchers REFUSE To Publish Study Because They Don’t Like The Results – Ask Dr. Drew – Ep 417

Episode Date: October 31, 2024

The New York Times reports that leading adolescent gender physician Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy is refusing to publish a nearly 10-year, $10 million taxpayer-funded study on the effectiveness of puberty-blocking drugs in children with gender dysphoria – because she doesn’t like the results. The researcher admits the study shows that “Puberty blockers did not lead to mental health improvements” but she has chosen not to publish the report because it might fuel “political attacks.” Other studies around the world have received similar treatment: according to the NYT, “British researchers reported that puberty blockers had not changed volunteers’ well-being, including rates of self-harm,” but the “results were not made public until 2020, years after puberty blockers had become the standard treatment for children with gender dysphoria in England.” Sharyl Attkisson is a five-time Emmy Award-winning investigative journalist and host of “Full Measure,” reaching 43+ million households weekly. A former CBS News, PBS, and CNN correspondent for over 30 years, she’s earned the Edward R. Murrow Award and authored multiple NYT bestsellers. Attkisson holds a fifth-degree black belt in TaeKwonDo and is a University of Florida journalism graduate. Her latest book “Follow the Science: How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails” is available now at https://amzn.to/4fgZurm. Find her latest reporting at https://sharylattkisson.com/ and follow her at https://x.com/SharylAttkisson Autumn Smith is the co-founder of Paleovalley. She has a Doctor of Science in Holistic Nutrition and is a Certified Eating Psychology Coach by the Institute for the Psychology of Eating. Autumn suffered acute digestive issues since she was a teenager and numerous experts failed to offer solutions that worked. The experience inspired her to co-found Paleovalley and offer products with integrity that are free from problematic ingredients. Learn more at https://drdrew.com/paleovalley 「 SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS 」 Find out more about the brands that make this show possible and get special discounts on Dr. Drew's favorite products at https://drdrew.com/sponsors  • PALEOVALLEY - "Paleovalley has a wide variety of extraordinary products that are both healthful and delicious,” says Dr. Drew. "I am a huge fan of this brand and know you'll love it too!” Get 15% off your first order at https://drdrew.com/paleovalley • FATTY15 – The future of essential fatty acids is here! Strengthen your cells against age-related breakdown with Fatty15. Get 15% off a 90-day Starter Kit Subscription at https://drdrew.com/fatty15 • CAPSADYN - Get pain relief with the power of capsaicin from chili peppers – without the burning! Capsadyn's proprietary formulation for joint & muscle pain contains no NSAIDs, opioids, anesthetics, or steroids. Try it for 15% off at https://drdrew.com/capsadyn • CHECK GENETICS - Your DNA is the key to discovering the RIGHT medication for you. Escape the big pharma cycle and understand your genetic medication blueprint with pharmacogenetic testing. Save $200 with code DRDREW at https://drdrew.com/check • THE WELLNESS COMPANY - Counteract harmful spike proteins with TWC's Signature Series Spike Support Formula containing nattokinase and selenium. Learn more about TWC's supplements at https://twc.health/drew 「 MEDICAL NOTE 」 Portions of this program may examine countervailing views on important medical issues. Always consult your physician before making any decisions about your health. 「 ABOUT THE SHOW 」 Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Kaleb Nation (https://kalebnation.com) and Susan Pinsky (https://twitter.com/firstladyoflove). This show is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only, and is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We are very excited and privileged today to welcome Cheryl Atkinson. She is a five-time Emmy Award-winning investigative journalist, host of Full Measure, 43-plus million households weekly, a former CBS, PBS, CNN correspondent for over 30 years, Edward R. Murrow Award recipient, author of multiple New York Times bestsellers. The latest is follow the science how big pharma misleads obscures and prevails there it is so we are going to follow the sciences two things i want to start with with cheryl one is you know i'm constantly asking

and finally i have a good investigative journalist or an honest ethical true investigative journalist in front of me today to ask what happened to investigative journalism. I've been asking that question for quite some time. And then what happened to science? And of course, what happened to pharma as a subset of that? So stay with us. Should be an interesting ride. It is right back after this. Our laws as it pertained to substances are draconian and bizarre. A psychopath started this. He was an alcoholic because of social media and pornography, PTSD, love addiction, fentanyl and heroin, ridiculous.

I'm a doctor for, where the hell do you think I learned that? I'm just saying, you go to treatment before you kill people. I am a clinician, I observe things about these chemicals. Let's just deal with what's real. We used to get these calls on Loveline all the time, educate adolescents and to prevent and to treat. You have trouble, you can't stop and you want to help stop it, I can help. I got a lot

to say. I got a lot more to say. Joint muscle pains are exhausting and frustrating, but I've got an over-the-counter medication I want to introduce you to that provides great relief using the power of, check it out, chili peppers. Capsodin is made with a proprietary formula that contains no non-steroidal anti-inflammatory agents, no opioids, no anesthetic or steroid, nothing, no chance for addiction, no side effects, no chance it's going to interact with other medication you might be taking. Capsodin contains capsaicin, which is the substance in chili peppers that burns your tongue. That gives you that burny feeling. And of course, I've recommended capsaicin creams to patients over the years, but other capsaicin creams burn your skin. That's what makes capsaicin so unique. In

clinical trials, capsaicin has actually been demonstrated not to burn i've been using capsidin to relieve my pain in my hands and my wrist from carpal tunnel syndrome and arthritis the results have been amazing i use it every day during my show and i highly recommend it get the pain relief you need from various sources even back aches sprarains, bruises even. Order now at capsidin.com slash drew to get a 15% discount plus free shipping. That is C-A-P-S-A-D-Y-N capsidin.com slash D-R-E-W. Cheryl will be with us in just a second. In addition to getting her book, Follow the Science, I want you to go to CherylAtkinson.com

or follow her on X. It's Cheryl Atkinson. Now, pay attention to the spelling. Cheryl is S-H-A-R-Y-L and Atkinson is A-T-T-K two T's, one K-I-S-S-O-N. So, it's Cheryl with an S and an A

and Atkinson, not Atkinson, it's A-T-T-K-I-S-S-O-N. Cheryl, welcome to the program. Well, I'm sorry you had to do all that spelling of the name. My privilege. That's how it works. I had to get used to it myself. I was like, okay, how do you spell your name again?

Where am I going to find it? So I think I will, let's start with the book, because I want to make sure we get that out there front and center. What did you learn in the process of writing the book? I thought what was really important to explore in a way I hadn't seen well done was not just the relationship between Big Pharma and the media, which I think people understand how much of the media has been bought out by money from big pharma advertising, and not just big pharma and our political figures and federal agencies, which I think people understand have been bought out with financial donations and all kinds of incentives, but big pharma and our medical establishment. And I'm talking about from medical school to the continuing medical education classes to the scientific journals

that our doctors rely on for their information and don't understand perhaps how compromised they are. And I think that relationship better explains than anything else why we've never spent more money on doctors, pills, insurance, and hospitals, and yet we're growing sicker and sicker of chronic diseases as a society. The journal issue has concerned me greatly. In the more recent pandemic response, or let's call it the pandemic state that took over what seemed like the world, the journals for a good year and a half, it was the most weird, stunning thing I'd ever seen. The majors all published data that only went one direction. And I started hearing stories about people like the Danish Dr. Vibhiki out in Denmark, who was questioning the potential side effects from certain lots. She was documenting that. Couldn't get that published for two years.

Just efficacy of certain things of treatment. It wasn't until literally, I kept the journal in front of me for a long time here. The Annals of Internal Medicine finally published an article, maybe almost two years into the pandemic, suggesting that, oh, lo and behold, Luvox, fluvoxamine, and an inhaled steroid might have some utility

in a relatively low-risk population of COVID cases. Oh, and I just thought, oh, we've crossed over. And again, that journal started publishing more realistic pros and cons of different things, which is the nature of science. It's a back and forth. You can't ever have all science going one direction because if it does, you know it's adulterated.

It's a back and forth and then you achieve a consensus. What has happened to our journals? How do they do this? Most people don't know that the journals have allowed themselves to become used as tools in warfare, propaganda warfare. For COVID, they were allowing themselves, we now know, to publish things that were surreptitiously written by, for example,

Dr. Fauci and others in defense of their actions, which were really, should have been under scrutiny in terms of the agreements they made with the communist Chinese to do dangerous and risky research that they were not talking about publicly at the time. And yet the journals allowed themselves to be used to publish articles that implied this was conspiracy theory stuff and untrue. But it dates back decades, Drew. I mean, there were complaints about the takeover of the scientific journals as early as a couple of decades ago from Dr. Marsha Angel, then the head of the New England Journal of Medicine, who has famously said she tried to erase some of the horrible pharmaceutical influence that

made so many studies not trustworthy and failed at that at the New England Journal of Medicine. And the current editor of the British journal Lancet, Richard Horton, has likewise said much, if not most of the science in today's journals is not to be believed because of all these things and tricks that are done in order to put out narratives and make sure that we don't see true science on many vexing and important consequential issues impacting us. yeah i i am so concerned about that because i mean all of our judgment uh is partially based on our clinical experience but also based on the literature and a and a familiarity with the landscape of the literature that's why you have to read broadly because literature, medical literature, doesn't go one direction. It just doesn't.

And RFK Jr. said one of the first things he would do if he gets into Washington was bring several of the majors in and tell them he was going to prosecute under a RICO law if they do not undo this influence. And by the way, it seems like a coordinated influence because they all go the same way. Well, I think people would be shocked to understand the true state of things. And I have current challenges with just two studies as a layperson that I believe taxpayer money was used to fund studies to put out false narratives to make the public believe something. And then when you try to go after why the data is wrong or why the samples are wrong

and find out the true data and the communications behind it, they claim secrecy. We can't even know when our own tax dollars were spent who the peer reviewers are who came up with the idea for a study. One prescient example is the Amish study. The Amish, you know, fared quite well after having ignored CDC guidelines on vaccination, isolation, and so on, and made more money as a community that first year of COVID than they ever had. And that was becoming widely reported. I reported it as well. Then out comes a federally funded study that appears designed to imply the

opposite. But when you look at the data, it did not. It, in fact, bolstered the idea that the Amish had a better approach, but that's not the message that was being sent. And they tried, it looks to me, to skew the data. For example, I think this is something any of us can understand. They're studying supposedly the Amish population, and I and others had reported on Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which is the largest Amish population in the country. Well, these study scientists excluded Lancaster, PA, and the Amish there for some reason from their study. They also blended the Mennonite population with the Amish, understanding full well that

the Mennonite population with the Amish, understanding full well that the Mennonite are typically CDC compliant. So you've now watered down your sample of those who don't follow CDC guidelines with a bunch of people who do and not telling what proportion that is, and then claim to come up with a valid study that disparages the Amish approach when the data even then didn't show that to be the case. I recently received a notification that they've made several corrections on the study as a result of my challenge and since publication of the book. But imagine how many studies are out there that nobody's doing anything about and we're just all swallowing the narratives.

Yeah, it's really very confusing to me how this happened. It's, what is your theory? I mean, what has happened to us? What's happened to journalism? What is it all? It seems too just so to say it's all money influence. It feels much more pernicious and pervasive and amoeboid than just so money. Well, it's complex, but I believe in the early 2000s, when many of us were covering medical controversies, and that was being

welcomed. It was not controversial to cover these stories in the early 2000s. The pharmaceutical industry was taking a big hit. Congress was doing important oversight, the major publications and networks, including me at CBS, we were covering these stories and actually resulting in getting dangerous medicines pulled off the market and questions being asked about certain vaccine policies. And the pharmaceutical industry fought back in a big way with an organized, well-financed global campaign to do several things to infiltrate the the media so they're not just influencing us from the outside, but they work in our newsrooms or they have people hired inside newsrooms who are sympathetic to protecting the pharmaceutical narratives.

They make sure that they controversialize the asking of the questions. They've worked hard on censorship. I mean, in the 2000 era, it was not typical for people to argue with the networks that a story should just not be told. It's very common today, but that was not common in the early 2000s. We often wanted to tell various sides of a story, and you'd have push me, pull you over that. But there weren't a lot of people saying, well, don't let the public even know about the controversy, but they were the architect of that. So they worked on social media. They worked on politics.

They worked on media. They've worked through nonprofits that they fund that sound innocent and independent. They work in the medical associations and through doctors and insurance. And they really, I believe, successfully control the information landscape in such a way that any information that can be co-opted, they've figured out how to do that and they have the money to do it. Did you see, I guess it was yesterday that there was a study allegedly that was blocked from publication because it essentially, I haven't seen the study, so I don't know for sure that it did so successfully, but that puberty blockers were not improving mental health outcomes in young people given these medications.

Well, there it is. Did you see that? Is that real? What do we know about that? Well, I haven't investigated that, but that's standard operating procedure. This is commonplace, only we don't usually know that a study is blocked because it's blocked quietly. So the studies that do not come out right, the pharmaceutical industry slash government partners frequently control the terms of publication now in a way that they didn't

maybe 25 years ago. Now, the researchers at academic institutions and other places have to sign contracts that say they can't publish the data. It used to be they could publish good or bad or indifferent data after a study. That's how science is advanced. But now, the terms are controlled by the industries. Therefore, many studies that are done, if they come out negative, let's say there's nine negative studies on a drug, but one that has a little hint of something positive. You may hear about the so-called positive study and not know that nine out of 10 showed something bad

because that's never going to be published. This is just one more way in which they control the information landscape. So in addition to wondering what's happened to science, what's happened to my profession, the other great question in my mind is what's happened to science what's happened to my profession the other great question in my mind is what's happened to journalism if i follow your logic pharma had an influence on how journalism got adulterated as well but i suspect there are other forces coming in on journalism maybe using the same playbook but this idea as you said of

the public can't know this or as we you and i discussed before the mics heated up the editor of the editorial page of the la times just five ten minutes ago resigned i don't know if it's a he or she because it's dangerous times and we must categorically endorse a particular candidate or else you know it's these are dangerous times that i must stand up as opposed to saying my job as a journalist is to report the facts and to uncover things as I give you the truth as much as possible. What has happened here and what are the adulterating influences? And is it the pharma that got it all going? I think these influences we've talked about to shape what we

report that started happening really in our 2004,2006 time period having a big impact. They've taken hold in such a way that entire newsrooms now are filled with a lot of people who think that their bias and ideas is actually good and it's okay to do journalism like that. And I kind of call it inmates running the asylum syndrome. We've seen it at the New York Times when there have been fair people there who've argued about fair coverage only to have other people and their colleagues uprise as if they are the audience and say that you can't report these things. And then we saw it recently at CBS News where I used to work, whereby there are people inside complaining about another reporter's interview and kind of arguing that with management so that management is pressured to do something as if, again, the employees of CBS are the audience rather than the people that you're

supposed to be speaking to on the news. So this has been a wholesale change that's happened over the past 15 years or so. And with the entrance of Donald Trump onto the political stage in 2015, that accelerated a lot of this with media in general deciding to overtly suspend their normal ethical standards and guidelines. And they said so. New York Times said so in order to cover a uniquely dangerous candidate in Donald Trump, whereby I argued, listen, that ethical standards have to be upheld when you hate a candidate. That's the purpose of the ethical standards, not just to apply them when you're covering somebody you like, but to apply them fairly when you're covering somebody you may personally not like. But instead, and then everybody followed suit, the New York Times said, oh, we're going to just

suspend our ethical guidelines and cover Donald Trump differently. Suspending ethical guidelines. This is something I can't get my head around, that young people don't seem to understand what an adulteration this is of the founding principles. In fact, I saw of journalism, of science, of medicine, and of this country. And I saw on X Today somebody making the case that the Bill of Rights was a paternalistic, colonizing sort of document meant to control people upon which they were colonizing, or something of that order,

rather than the understanding the intent, which is to be able to fight back. How do we get this horse back in the barn? Well, the notion that we're even, for example, debating the terms of free speech, where some people are saying, well, should false information be censored or true information be censored,

that there's even a conversation shows how far we've moved or how much propaganda has really influenced us in the past five to seven years, because I don't think that discussion should be held and never would have been held not too long ago. But I think on the plus side, the censors and these people who are trying to shape narratives were so audacious and so proven wrong on so many fronts during COVID, it really opened a lot of people's eyes who weren't paying particular attention. Suddenly, people who weren't really thinking about these issues saw some of what was happening, and people who never considered themselves activists turned into activists

and are paying closer attention. And I do think that's the way out ultimately is more people to become aware of it and to question it. To fight for our freedoms, which we've all taken for granted. I mean, you feel like you've been fighting this fight for a long time. For me, this is such an, I'm astonished. I'm one of those people that have just become aware of it more recently. And it's mind-boggling to me but it sounds like you've been sort of either sort of seeing this coming or been doing this in real time for quite some time i i had a show at cnn hln for many years all throughout the teens you know 2000 teens i never had any trouble with anybody telling me to do anything or how i

should report stuff and i was on don Don Lemon and, and, um, uh, almost every night, uh, at least certainly during the 2016 campaign, um, the show was canceled because of usual, you know, sort of television sort of priorities. Now, when I did say something that they took issue with or in 2016, did freak out that was the first time i any sense of them them being uh sort of trying to in any way influence what i talked about but there it came it is a mud and so my thinking was geez it's maybe it's all kind of trump derangement sort of that's what really put this all on steroids that covid was trump derangement trump derangement the the response in 2016 was trump derangement. We're still seeing the excesses that, you know, like I said, the editorial board at LA Times, now the editor is resigning because of the dangerous

times we're in, which sounds like Trump derangement again. What do you think? You've been at this for a long time. Let me say that I think there's a line we can draw between the Trump derangement and the other things that we've been talking about. Because I suspected, and I think this was borne out very early in the 2015 time period, the reason they, you know, the big establishment folks on both the left and right and those who hold the power and the money in our country, the reason they were so afraid of Donald Trump and decided to suspend their standards and do all these things that we've talked about is because he was uniquely dangerous to the establishment and the money system. He did not come up the way a typical Democrat or Republican came up with promises and donations from not just the pharmaceutical industry, but definitely the pharmaceutical industry, but many other big industries as well that tend to call the shots on Capitol Hill and with our laws and federal agencies

like defense-interested causes and so on. And I think they worked very hard to try to come up with a narrative to make us hate Donald Trump and fear him because they feared him, but for other reasons. And so, you know, I think if you look back, they tried the narrative first that he was a clown, a carnival barker, a joker. That was almost universally discussed on the news. When he grew more popular, they tried, oh, he's dark and dangerous. That was big for a couple of weeks, dark and dangerous, not a clown anymore. And when that didn't work, you can trace almost the exact date that there was a shift in the propaganda to call him racist and white supremacist, which actually, even though he got elected

in 2016, took a little more hold than some of those other narratives. And they've tried to stick with that ever since. The people today may think they hate Donald Trump because of his personality and mean tweets, but I argue that they were made to hate Donald Trump in part by a very sophisticated and organized propaganda campaign. You've used the word propaganda several times now. What do you mean by that and how is that operating? Tell us more about that. I mean either false information that is perpetuated to make us try to believe something put out en masse through social media and media and so on, or sometimes true information that is either misrepresented or mischaracterized in a way to scare us or mislead us.

And you can tell by the use of global law firms, LLCs, giant crisis management firms, as I try to talk about somewhat with some very specific cases and follow the science, we saw them emerge in a big way around that 2005 time period and try to enter into the news process to try to impact what we are covering and make us not cover certain stories. And you can see that this was a very well-organized effort to put out, as I said, either true information that's not really characterized properly or completely false information.

And it was very successful. I mean, the whole notion of the phrase anti-vaccine, if you look back, that was almost a phrase unheard of around the 2000 time period. And I argue it was very effectively invented and deployed. And it's effective with people today for some reason, when they hear that it works in order to try to get people off the trail that they were on in the early 2000s. I'm talking about media doctors and everybody else looking at certain vaccine safety issues. Well,

they practically shut that down with a very effective campaign that the government became part of to say that anybody that asked rational, logical, reasonable questions was anti-vaccine. And to this day, even though it makes no sense in many instances, that still works. actually done their research and applied psychological operations to understand what phrases work with the public and will resonate with them and make people sound crazy when they're not just for asking the question. And that's one really big one I can point to. You said psyops. Again, I mean, I want to drill into the word propaganda. What makes something propaganda? Who's doing the psyops?

Where is the psyops happening? Where are they? Who's doing the science? Where is the psyops happening? Where are they? Who's doing that? And what do they do with it? How does that work? Well, I think corporate slash government is now very connected at many levels. So I might tell you that I know

corporations hire PR firms that come up with these methods that have been used by our intelligence agencies that we know have been deployed in the past to convince people. Wait, let's stop with that. Let's stop with that. So there's PR firms that are publicly, they name them. I mean, there are people out there who can hire them, right?

Yep. And they're using marketing strategies. I always think about Madison Avenue style strategies, which we know have clouded us in a million ways, whether it's shampoos or drug medication. I mean, Madison Avenue has influenced us. And are you saying that they have certain techniques? Let's say, I mean, let's say that I've recently become aware that the food industry is using certain techniques. A lot of it is just developing the addictive quality of the food. But they have certain techniques that are proven in psychological sort of objective testing that they change behavior.

And they're using these things. And why don't people talk about these things? Where are they? Where's that data? Or is it all intelligence operations that are doing this? And is it really behind closed doors and no one's allowed to know what their techniques are? I think we have hints as to what's happening. And some of that I've written about. I can give you a very specific example when we're talking about strategies.

There was a doctor or or actually a researcher, a University of California, Berkeley, an African American man who began, was hired by a chemical company to investigate atrazine, a chemical that's ubiquitous in our environment, used on corn crops. Probably most of us are drinking some of it in our drinking water. And 20 years ago, he was hired by the company, which I believed hoped he could prove it was safe and not harmful because the EPA was looking at regulating it more. Well, unfortunately for him, he found out that this drug was feminizing male frogs and having all kinds of other problems. And when he wanted to report that, they, of course, didn't want him,

the company, to publish the study, and they were writing the checks. So to his credit, he went independent, quit, and repeated the research on his own terms and was able to report that. There have been hundreds of studies since building upon the dangers of atrazine or the supposed dangers and the amounts that we get in our water, not just the feminization of males, but other things too. But through a lawsuit with some water systems and cities and counties that sued the company, and there was a settlement, we have internal documents that show what the company did to this researcher for him having the misfortune of finding the truth out about this chemical. And among the things they did, of course, they called his bosses, tried to contact his students and controversialize him, researched him, tried to go after his wife with research and make negative things around her,

followed him around to speeches and kind of, he thinks, let him know he was being followed. He's not the first researcher to say that so that he would be, you know, kind of intimidated by that. They purchased search terms online so that if you searched feminized frogs or his name, Dr. Tyrone, researcher Tyrone Hayes, they said in their research, they didn't want you to find his research. They wanted you to find their studies that tried to make his research look debunked or untrue when it wasn't. They wanted you to find their studies that tried to make his research look debunked or untrue when it wasn't. They wanted you to find articles that they had commissioned through journalists that may sound independent but who were not. They wanted those to turn up debunking, again, Dr. Hayes' work when it hadn't been debunked at all. So these are some of the strategies they do that they spend a lot of money working on. And when you look at these documents and see the connections this company had to independent sounding journalists and nonprofits

and so on that were publishing what the chemical company wanted that was contrary to what the researchers were finding, it's amazing when you see how far their reach was and how much money they're able to spend doing it. We were talking to Cheryl Atkinson. Yes. Caleb, you want to say that? Caleb is sending me a little message here. There's a famous meme of Alex Jones where he's just yelling and saying, oh, they're making the frogs gay,

the freaking frogs gay. And they use that as a way of discounting anyone who says this type of stuff when in reality you go and look into it and you're like, hold on a second. There's research studies and scientists that were whistleblowers about this saying well yes atrazine was making the frogs gay like it was feminizing the frog we have we have a something is tanking our testosterone levels and you know whether it's plastic and the estrogens or whether

it's after or whatever we we need to have a problem and it can no longer be denied or all of it exactly uh we gotta take a little break here with cheryl akerson uh get the book it is follow the science or whatever, we need to have a problem and it can no longer be denied or all of it. Exactly. We're going to take a little break here with Cheryl Atkinson. Get the book. It is Follow the Science. You can follow her on Cheryl Atkinson. When I come back, two things I want to sort of focus on there is that book.

One is what do we do about all this? What is the solution? Do you have any thoughts about what we can, how we get ourselves out of this mess? And you've already mentioned advocating for our Bill of Rights, which I can't say without laughing. It's just odd to me that we're in this mess. And you've already mentioned advocating for our Bill of Rights, which I can't say without laughing. It's just odd to me

that we're in this world. But the other thing I want to talk about is, you know, what are the forces at work here? You know, who are the, are there way upstream forces that we should be

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We are talking to cheryl akison uh so my before the break we were talking about the propaganda we've all been under the influence of i think i think covid sort of pulled the tape off some of this we could start to see the propaganda at work um if you're a naive person like me a naive trusting person you it was shocking still I'm in disbelief and confusion about it, but there it was. I'm guessing for you, it wasn't that shocking. You were sort of working in and around this stuff for quite some time. My question to you though, as we continue this conversation is, should you be worried about upstream? People get very paranoid about the upstream influences, this or that billionaire, World Health Organization, the Atlantic Council. Should we be concerned about these groups as much as the moneyed influence circulating around? Well, I think it's probably one and the same.

And my research has not identified a name. There are a handful of, relative handful of common interests who are funding a lot of this stuff. And I have traced some of that and written about it as well. But I can only tell you there is that unseen hand having undue influence.

And I can give you a couple tangible examples. In vaccine court, when they were deciding a bunch of test cases on vaccine and autism. I had a top firsthand source tell me in advance that they were going to admit that in one specific case, vaccines did cause the child's autism and it was going to change everything about what this country had been told.

We're talking about 20 years ago. And then before the decision came out, something changed. And when the decision was reported, they said, oh, there's no link. This is all just crazy talk. And I knew the opposite had actually been decided behind closed doors. But somebody somehow changed this court decision prior to it being announced to the public. And we later found out what had happened was the court or somebody involved with it carved out that case, settled it privately and sealed it so the public would not know that the government had admitted vaccines caused this

child's autism. It leaked out a couple of years later, but they were keeping it secret. Who has the power to reach down into a federal vaccine court and tell them not to announce the decision they had arrived at? I mean, that's one. I have many examples, but that's one case where you got to wonder who it is above a federal court that's able to reach down and do that. You have a theory? I don't want to say because I could never confirm. I asked, I specifically asked some of my sources. I gave them names. And here's a direct quote.

One of them would say back to me, we do not operate in a political vacuum here in the court. And I would say, well, is it, I'd toss out names, and this person would just repeat, we do not operate in a political vacuum. One real quick one too. Go ahead. The House and Senate will not ever anymore hold hearings on vaccine safety, particularly on vaccines and autism. They used to. And every time one of the members tries, because there are members very interested in this, they are stopped. Both Democrats and Republicans at the top party level will not allow it. And who reaches in and says they can't when the members and the committees want to do this? And I have them on camera saying this, the members themselves.

It's weird. Hard to understand this. One of the things I was thinking about when I was preparing to talk to you, I believe the Department of Justice has come after you in very strange ways. And my question, and when I get an investigative journalist is, you know, what are your thoughts? What have you discovered? What has happened to fill in the blank, medicine, science? And one of those was the Department of Justice.

I feel like something has adulterated our Department of Justice. Is it the three-letter agencies? What has happened to us? Well, I can only tell you what my sources who alerted me that I was being spied on by the government when I was a CBS News investigative correspondent before we knew they were doing this to multiple people. They were shocked. These are insiders who said that that agency or these agencies have been transformed and have worked, been politically

weaponized in a way that they personally had not seen in their years at the agencies prior to that. One of the people who helped me with the surveillance that was being done to me, unbeknownst to me at the time, is a former FBI unit chief who's a lawyer who was stunned when his analysis turned up what the government had done and found government IP addresses had been in my computer, among other things, watching my CBS News work and getting into the system. He said in his time, I mean, he was not so long ago had worked at the FBI. He said they would never go near a journalist, even if they thought they had cause just because it looks so bad in terms of constitutional issues, that they would just stay away from journalists. and he couldn't believe what he'd found in the forensics i i've heard that over and over again so our our intelligence

agencies and federal agencies have been politicized and weaponized in ways that shock even the insiders who've operated honestly within them for decades yeah it when i the more i hear about these things the more everything sounds like this extraordinarily complex web, whether it's the moneyed influence or the intelligence influence or the Department of Defense influence. I have as I'm trying to understand things as an outsider, was so much of the nonsense about COVID seems shrouded in bad thinking, no evidence, fiat, why can't we talk about the lab leak? We can't, just can't. It made me wonder, does the Department of Defense and the intelligence operations have knowledge about, for instance, why we're doing gain-of-function research or the ability to back pharma so they can have control over that in the setting of a bioterror event? Is there something that they're not telling us that either we don't need to know or if we knew it would be too much?

Is there something in that zone that is also operating here? There are people who have long said that even though we are not allowed to, based on treaties, do biological warfare research, that we never stopped. And you could argue that it makes some sense because if other countries are doing it and we stop, we're allowed to do defensive, not offensive, then that wouldn't make much sense. But on the other hand, I learned from covering military vaccine issues starting over 20 years ago when I was getting introduced to all this and assigned to cover that. There is so much protection and intermingling of the vaccine industry and the military that just stunned me. I was like you. You said you were surprised during COVID.

That happened to me in the early 2000s. I thought this stuff can't be true. And when it was, it's just one thing after another. These dominoes start falling and you realize what's really going on. But yes, I do think our federation. What's your tell us? What's really going on? What's your assessment?

What's really going on? What's your assessment? What's really going on? I think it's probably not. I don't have full visibility, but I think part of the answer is these powerful industries have figured out how to co-opt any form of information that can be co-opted, whether it's media, big tech, political figures, or our medical institutions and associations. They have slowly figured out how to do it. And we in the media did a poor job of establishing firewalls to make sure that wouldn't happen. And of course, our political figures established no firewalls to make sure that they

would maintain independence. So what you have, instead of, of course, pharmaceutical companies are going to try to make money, and they should. They have a fiduciary duty to try to earn money for their shareholders. But that was always balanced between oversight with the federal government and the media, too. Now you have all three entities and nobody doing the proper oversight. What's going to happen? We've got this really out-of-balance dynamic that doesn't benefit public health. But I think that's where we are today. And it seems like the final sort of battleground that was lost,

that is sort of codifying and sort of formally indoctrinating up and coming journalists say, or media participants is academia that that is that has sort of created a you know a way of continuing this in a formal way so it's so it's endorsed in some way by you know institutions that are previously respected how did that happen any ideas similar fashion i mean columbia Review, which was an esteemed publication, has been largely funded by the same handful of interests that I'm talking about, like Craig Newmark of Craigslist. Millions and millions of dollars for projects to fact check,

which you can translate to mean most of the time now, hide the facts on things that the pharmaceutical industry doesn't want. You can look at Poynter Institute, which used to be a well-regarded journalism school that operates and gives advice. They've been fully co-opted. They now operate pretty much as a left-wing propaganda arm for pharmaceutical and climate change issues. And you can just see that happening one after the other. And might I add, you know, med school, I discuss in the book how doctors are taught from the Merck manual written by Merck Pharmaceutical Company,

which claims, you know, that all of the problems it's had with bribing doctors and kickbacks and having to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements for alleged fraud has nothing to do with their editorial of this book, this popular reference book for doctors. But I looked up a few topics to see how Merck handles it, and they have completely false information in there. For example, what does Merck say about its own controversial HPV Gardasil vaccine? It literally said in there

that there were no serious adverse events reported, which of course is false. And even if you look at their label, which they've written, there are dozens, everything from paralysis to death, but they're teaching doctors, none have been reported. And since I've been talking about this, they pulled that line out of the Merck manuals online because they got caught. If I went through every page of that manual, I know I could probably find hundreds of examples where they are misleading doctors. And then we wonder why doctors go into practice and treat us the way they do, where they're very oriented toward reducing us to a series of target numbers to be achieved, regardless of our real overall health. They're

not even curious about what's causing the problems in many instances. They're simply pushing more and more treatments and expensive pills on us. I always argued that we are so sick as a country and there's so much illness that every doctor is just too busy dealing with illness. We have no time to deal with anything else. That's all we can do.

We are trying to literally save lives, either because of serious unfortunate events, accidents, infections, or because of lifestyle issues that have run amok, and they're years out of control, and we're just trying to lengthen life however we can. And all we have, literally all we have, is a scalpel or pharmacology. That's all we have, literally all we have is a scalpel or pharmacology.

That's all we have by the time you get to that point. And so it's sort of natural that we would be easily persuaded that, you know, these companies that are helping us fight that fight, we should trust them because it's all we got. What should we do? This system was designed by the companies that want us to be treated with either the scalpel or the other way you mentioned and not looking at the prevention. I think medicine will look different someday if we're lucky and would look completely different without the undue influences that we're talking about. It would be more preventive oriented. We would be using things that are now considered or they want us to believe are kind of alternative and fringe that insurance companies won't cover. We'd be doing a lot more of that if those making the money

off the pharmaceutical treatments weren't influencing what insurance will cover and won't cover and what becomes- Well, and to be fair, again again i talked to uh who is trump's hhs secretary i'm blanking on his name right now of a guy but he said the really serious problem is the cost of phase three clinical trials getting enough pathology get enough big enough n to power the study and the cost of the study make it impossible for most of these things that you're saying are fringe to be able to be approved and get so we can use these things like stem cells. We can use these things like a million things we could be doing that we just aren't either trained in or we can't do

because we can't get it through the proper regulatory agencies because of cost and because of the barriers put in place that need not necessarily be there. Well, I think you put your finger on it. There are barriers put in place so that only the largest pharmaceutical companies, in many cases, can afford the cost of looking into something. So the smaller ones that may have a line on something have no chance at funding what they want to do to try to get it approved. I also think that, again, the system is designed to make us rely on studies that actually are often behind the curve.

If you look at what is some of the most reliable data and hints on how to treat people, it comes from the sheer clinical experience from peer-reviewed published study that maybe nobody wants to fund if no one's going to make money off of the findings, we're waiting for that and we're taught to wait for that. I have a chapter about that in the book. Rather than learning from the clinical experience or encouraging doctors to share these types of things and treating that as if it's valuable evidence that can lead us in a way that's not expensive and time-consuming. It's time-consuming. Yeah, I want to point out, to pile on to what you're saying,

that the gold standard, the thus saith the Lord RCTs, the randomized clinical control trials, have only been around for about 60 years. Before that, all we had was clinician experience. That is how we made judgments and how we shaped what we did. COVID, one of the most astonishing chapters of that mess to me was physician clinical impressions was vilified and became actively a threat to our ability to practice medicine. God forbid, if we did something that fit a certain clinical experience we had that didn't get handed down from Dr. Fauci, we could lose our license or get criminally assaulted. I think there is evidence that terms like

randomized controlled trials and evidence-based medicine have been co-opted and used in some instances to make sure there is a delay in either pulling a questionable treatment off the market when companies are making money because there has to be a randomized controlled trial to prove something before you can really act upon it when that's not the case. And I think that these, again, these strategies are taught to doctors and they parrot them in many instances without thinking too hard about them. And it's all designed, if you look at it, to funnel us into the same kinds of expensive treatments without looking at root causes and other answers to the questions that could provide perhaps a lot of relief to the chronic disorders that we're suffering.

I'm thinking about COVID and the guaranteed effect of lockdowns and closing schools on young people, and lo and behold, the mental health crisis that has developed. Whoops, we have to use medication because these kids are now sick. But we cause sickness in this country so many ways. It isn't just food. It isn't just undue influence somewhere. We seem unable to attend to our health and well-being and centralizing authority, which is what we keep doing more and more of, is going to go the other

direction. And to me, that's how we got into this trouble. I'm putting way too much authority. And the federal government is never supposed to be in our life. It was supposed to deal with defense and interstate commerce essentially, and help the states get along. The fact that this is all, it guarantees ill health to me

because undue influences get centralized, and stupid decisions get made, lockdowns, and people get sick. Well, what should be most concerning is with the benefit of hindsight, we can see very clearly misinformation and disinformation put out by the government or federal agencies and politicians and pharmaceutical industry. I mean, there's a huge list of that. To this day, nothing's changed. I mean, the only thing I can see is CDC and its budget increased every year since then with no strings attached.

And so I don't understand why any of us really should think that it would be different next time in terms of if we're not going to hold anybody accountable, even though we all know all these things that went wrong, but nobody's done anything about it. Why would it be different next time? It's so discouraging to me. It's so, I will let you ask it in a second, but the reality is that we as physicians do have something to offer. Public health community does have something to offer, but the public has lost faith as well they should have. and they don't really understand what and where we should be, and we shouldn't be making, we shouldn't be helping people lead a good life. Leading a good life and being happy is something that you should be attending to

with your family and your community. And the idea that a medication or a pill or a doctor is going to let you lead a good life, we have gone way, way in a bad direction. But go ahead, Caleb, what do you want to ask there? Yeah, it's just a quick question, Cheryl, with your experience here, because you were talking about how the CDC is captured. And we just had Dr. Robert Redfield, who was the former director of the CDC on yesterday, who also was saying, yes, all of these are captured by big pharma.

So recently, I'm sure that you saw that Trump, he had that very big publicity stunt whenever he went to a McDonald's. It went very well. It was all this great publicity and PR. And then it just so happens, coincidentally, strangely, I'm guessing, that the CDC then days later, just yesterday, put out this explosive thing about E. coli outbreak linked to McDonald's. And if you go down the Google search, all of a sudden, all the search results in the news for McDonald's are now all about this E. coli outbreak and their stock is crashing, even though the timing just seems kind of ridiculous, because even though this actually began a month ago. So is the CDC, do you actually,

have you seen evidence that they're so corrupted that they would actually politicize this and time this to affect the election? Like, is that how bad it's gotten over there? I don't know with the burger thing, but the same thought crossed my mind because yes, they have done very suspect things in the past in terms of timing and what they release and how they act and what they want you to think. So, you know, that's how my thought process works these days when I saw the E. coli story come out. Strange timing. The fact that we know that the press thinks that they have the prerogative duty, it's important for them to report on e-coli outbreaks really is that is that really their thing well why don't you give us the whole mmw morbidity mortality weekly report on important

infectious diseases is that is that now the domain of the press to the general public uh and by the way i was seeing them focus on something here locally in In the meantime, we had an indigenous dengue fever outbreak for mosquitoes in this region transmitting dengue fever. That is a huge deal. This is a gigantic deal. Not a word about that. Because they have no judgment. They don't know what they're reporting on.

So somebody's pushing this, it seems to me. An insider told me years ago, and I thought it was sort of a joke, but now it seems instructive. He said, when we tell you or CDC tells you not to worry about something, you probably ought to worry. When we tell you to worry about something, you probably needn't worry. And really, when you look at what they've done, the hyping the fear over flu and flu shots not being effective and them knowing this with the study big study they conducted some years ago that I reported on all the way to this EVD 68 paralysis outbreak that they didn't want to talk about you'd think gosh they talk always talk about it when

kids are sick but if not if there's not a vaccine for it and I had to sue them in court to try to just get basic information on hundreds of children that were showing up in recent years, kind of suddenly paralyzed with a polio-like virus that should be of concern to all of us, according to doctors that were seeing the cases. CDC would not talk about it, would not give information about it. So it's very, like you say, the priorities that they focus on versus the ones they don't are very suspect. Well, and that the press goes along with this is the part that I find just disgusting and weird. So what do we do?

What do we do? What is the road out? We're going to sort of conclude with this. Try to help us do our duty to make things better. Well, on a positive note, a lot of good doctors who, again, had not considered themselves mavericks, but were well-published and sometimes world-renowned, during COVID, split from establishment medicine. They were so disgusted with the unethical things that they saw. And they're starting new organizations and having conferences and even commissioning their own studies to address things

that the government and public health structure does not seem to want to address, there are new resources now being developed. And it's not small. There are lots and lots of people joining these sorts of groups. That's good for us. And we'll be hearing more from them. On a local level or a personal level, I think there are ways, unfortunately, you have to start culling more of your own information. The media used to do that for you. At least we used to try to do that. Can't count on the media to give you good health information yourself. You're going to have to do some research, but it's possible to find good sources.

And I have guides on that and follow the science in the last chapter, places to start. One big hint that sounds obvious, but maybe is not to most people. When you find somebody that's been reliable on a health issue in the past, go back to that person and consider that information in the future. As simple as that sounds, why are so many in the media still interviewing those who are wrong, provably wrong about so many things regarding COVID? Still treating those people incredibly. Why? What is that?

I mean, you can see the composite videos of them being wrong dozens of times. And by the way, changing their tune repeatedly, but not saying, you know what? I was wrong. I've adjusted my opinion. No, no. I always knew this. I just didn't say it. And then they even stopped defending themselves. Just keep saying the wrong things. Part of the capture

that we've talked about, but that's the tell. You as a viewer at home, you're smart. You have common sense. You know something's wrong when you see them relying on the same bad sources. So there are good sources that are on record that you can find. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the FLCCC has a variety of opinions and sources and a website that will give you studies and alternate information when you're trying to find the truth about some of these things. So there are places to go. But last tip, when most of the media and social media is on the same page, trying to shove an idea down your throat, particularly when they're trying to censor an opposing idea, that's usually a tell that there's probably some truth to be found in the thing that they're trying to censor and that there's some powerful

interest pushing out this narrative because it's not organic that all the media and everybody else would use the same phrases and interview the same people and all be banging the same drumbeat. That's not natural. That's not natural. That's not normal. So your thought should be as a consumer of information, who wants me to believe this and why? And what could be the real truth

that they don't want me to know? So interesting. So hearing the same messaging from multiple outlets is a tell. Canceling and attacking is a tell. Same bad sources is a tell. This is good. We're compiling a list of how to sort of navigate through all this stuff. Is that list in the book?

Yeah. And how about trust your common sense? I mean, again, we were being told to believe things that everybody understands in retrospect and some understood at the time weren't true and couldn't be true or didn't make sense. Trust that. Don't let someone convince you that because everybody's saying something that's contrary to what seems right to you, that they're necessarily right because they're often not, but they think if enough people say it, you'll just sort of shut your mouth and accept it because maybe you'll think you're the only one. We did. We did. That's what happened. We, we can't be sheep like that anymore. We must not.

And, you know, I was thinking about the other thing, which is panic. When you see them inducing panic, I swear to God, early in the pandemic, if I heard the word staggering or grim one more time, I was going to just tear my skin off. And that was early in the pandemic before there were any numbers, let alone staggering numbers. And it kept going, grim milestone, grim milestone, grim milestone. Okay. Anybody remember any of those grim milestones? If we really achieved a grim milestone, it must have been terrible. It's a grim milestone. Holy shit. But no, it's just panic, more repeating the same thing. To whom is it a

benefit? Did you use that phrase, Caleb? Did Cheryl use that phrase? Is that why you're putting it up there? That's the question that I always ask. Who's benefiting from this information? When I'm reading an article and just like what she was saying, you can go down pages and pages. You search McDonald's, that's everything. Who is benefiting from that? Well, I literally just thought they were trying to get eyeballs. Their benefit was they get ratings,

they get ad revenue. But it turns out, lo and behold, it is much more complicated and much deeper web with multiple sources of influence. Exactly. Cheryl, I appreciate you being here. Thank you for your work.

I've not read the book yet, but I can't wait to do so. I've always tried to follow the science, but little did I know, even as best I could do it, there was some adulteration of what I was reading. I guess the good news is we are now aware, and this was not something that really just came up three years ago or four years ago. It's been underway for some time, and it is time to keep our priorities straight and fight where we have to fight. So thank you.

Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate you giving voice to this important information. You got it. Cheryl Atkinson, Follow her on X. Go to CherylAtkinson.com. Get the book, Follow the Science. Now, in just a book, a bit, we're going to welcome back Autumn Smith. You remember her from Paleo Valley.

She, of course, is the co-founder of that company and got my team and you guys in the audience hooked on the protein sticks and the bone broth. I just had some chocolate brumbot literally before we started the show. And we're in good company. Chef Andrew Gruhl is a huge fan of their grass-fed and finished beef tallow. I used tallow last night in my cooking. Autumn is a newly minted doctor of science and holistic nutrition. She takes this all very seriously. Lots of information about the food supply, especially sourcing.

Suffice it to say, not all bone broths are the same, as I've told you many times. As you know, Paleo Valley is made with actual bones, not hides. And as I've also mentioned, the cattle is grass-fed, finished beef. Go to drdrew.com slash Paleo Valley for 15% off your first order. Better yet, subscribe. Save 20% so you don't run out. That is at drdrew.com slash paleovalley. And in our subscription, we get boxes. I mean, it's very funny. We started running out. We were like, oh my God, we're running out of the beefsteaks. Box arrived. Thank you to the subscription of a lot of, and I looked at the amount in there. I thought, wow, we really eat

this much stuff. That is amazing. Susan, you want to say something before I bring Autumn in? So, so good yes uh so autumn can be followed um let's see she's really at paleo valley on x and instagram as i said she is a co-founder doctor of science and holistic nutrition certified eating in psychology coach by the institute for the psychology of eating um often had some issues herself, and so she looked into this, and she came up with and founded Paleo Valley, which we are really grateful she did.

Again, our stuff is at DrDogs.com slash Paleo Valley. Is Autumn there to come in, Caleb? There she is. Autumn, welcome back. Thanks, Dr. Drew. I love being here, and I love your show. Just appreciate your support. We are major fans and this community of ours is a major fan of yours as well. And

it's so easy because the products are just amazing. So I have, it's funny, I have moved around. I was a beef stick and then I was a venison and now I'm back at chicken. And I love the chicken sticks. They're only like 40 calories or something, right? Are they 60 calories or 40 calories? They're very low calorie, which shocked me. Yeah, there's 45 calories in some and 60 in others. It just depends on the flavor you're going for. But yes, six grams of protein, 45 calories. I eat so many of them every day. And it's a very simple, delicious way to increase protein, which we both know is good for your health in many different ways. Yeah, I take it when I travel and stuff, and this is my go-to. So take the audience again on the journey of how you got here. Just briefly, you had your own

issues, and then you started looking into this, but I'm more interested this time in, much like what I was just talking about, Cheryl Atkinson, as you uncovered stuff, what did you find and what did you think and how did you solve those problems? Yes. Fascinating. So starting at the age of 10, I had IBS. That's the diagnosis I was given and doctors didn't really know what to do with me. They told me it was a stress-based condition and that I should take some Bino and relax and it didn't really help. And so I know, I know that was the solution at the time. And we know that irritable bowel syndrome has many different causes, right? And some are related to the diet, which I found out later. But as I got into the teens, I got mental health issues. You know,

there's this gut brain access. I just became a mess. I got anxiety, depression, you know, substance abuse was the way I kind of coped with emotional and physical pain. And it wasn't until I met my husband and he realized, wow, you're really suffering. We should probably try to fix this, that we stumbled onto diet back in 2007 as a potential cure. I was so, it was so flabbergasted by 30 days of dietary intervention, being able to reverse and cure 15 years of my suffering. And then later that next year, my mental health changing so dramatically that I thought I really need to understand food better. I was a celebrity fitness trainer at the time, and I'd always gone in the psychology direction,

which is why I'm such a fan of yours. But I decided to quit those jobs and go back and study pretty much anything I could about how food was able to do something so transformative for me. And as you're alluding to, I discovered a lot of very fascinating things that diet and the food you're consuming is absolutely related to your digestive health, to your mental health, to every aspect of your health. And right now it's considered a soft science in our medical world, but that it shouldn't be. And so I'm here to help create the products that make healthy food convenient in our modern world. And I also found out a lot of dietary myths,

a lot of foods that I was avoiding, like meat and animal products were actually really important for my health. And the origins of their demonization was absolutely fascinating. And that's kind of what led me to do the docuseries and try to kind of unravel where did these narratives come from? And it was very interesting.

Where can they see the docuseries? That comes out in January. It's called Rethink Meat and there's eight episodes. We go into the origins of our meat fear, which have their roots in religion, in entrepreneurship, right? And the sugar industry and science that has been kind of co-opted. It's a very fascinating journey. And like you said, what we're being told and what is true sometimes is very different. And food is one of those. Where will we get access to the meat series?

Where can we watch it you know you can watch it on youtube yeah we'll show you uh we're going to have a reveal at january 7th is when the first episode they'll all become live and if you want to subscribe to paleovalley.com you can enter your email address and wild pastures as well it will be available there too and talk about some of the details in what you have done and how you attend to these products, like the fermentation and why, and the sourcing and why,

and the farming and why. Because to me, that's just so impressive that you didn't just go to the, hey, diet's important, I create some products that solve some of these problems. You went, and this is such an important, you know, siblings kaylee and kelly casey and kelly means have sort of brought this into public awareness now chef gruel's making people aware of it he's been at this for quite some time and now it's becoming a matter of national discourse so good on you for

being right on time with this but talk about those specific details that you attend to and why. Yeah, because basically my transformation showed me that food is not just fuel, it's information. It's building our cells. It's building our brain. It's building the signals that determine whether or not we are vibrant or whether or not we are suffering. And today, 67% of our children's calories and 58% of our adult American calories come from ultra-processed

foods that are hijacking our appetite and our satiety mechanisms. They're causing us to eat more and they're also nutrient poor. So then we're not having enough nutrients and 11 million people are dying each year worldwide due to eating too much bad food and not enough good food. And so what I realized is the devil's in the details here. And not only do we have to attend to every single ingredient, we have to support a system with whole foods. And those whole foods need to be created in a way that supports environmental health.

That's the other problem, to think that we can damage the environment and us maintain vibrant health, I think that's very ignorant. And I think that's another idea whose time has come. And this is why we're such champions of regenerative agriculture, of organic ingredients. We have tens of thousands of chemicals in our food supply today. We have pesticides, we have soil deterioration. And so when we source a product, it's going to be organic, it's going to be tested for pesticides, and then it's going to be grass-fed and finished or pasture-raised.

It's going to be raised on regenerative American farms because every single time you buy or produce a food, you're essentially driving the market. And so we want to give people the opportunity to participate in the environmental restoration and the restoration of America's health, which we absolutely, we need. And the fermentation process came about because there was an ingredient that I didn't like in meat sticks. That's pretty widespread. It's called encapsulated citric acid and it's derived from GMOs and then hydrogenated oil. And it just melts into the beef stick and you don't have to label it. That's the thing. You can label it citric acid, but it still involves those ingredients. And I thought,

I don't want to have products that contain those ingredients. So how do we do it instead? And you ferment it like people were doing decades, centuries ago. And it leads to a product that is more gut friendly and that you don't have to include the chemicals in. And there's actually different in terms of, it's kind of got like a juiciness. So yeah, we're very, very strict about every single ingredient because we understand the connection between what we're eating, how we're feeling, how we're treating the environment, and that you have to address all of those issues. Keep going with the regenerative farming. I think that's going to be the next chapter of sort of public awareness of what we're doing here. I don't think we're there yet. I think they're just coming to an awareness of the need for what you're advocating and what you've created

here. So what is the call to action? What do you want people to do? Okay, so we have to understand, particularly when it comes to meat, over 90% of the meat products on the market today in grocery stores come from factory farms. We know factory farms have deleterious environmental consequences, and regenerative agriculture is different. You can think of three types of agriculture happening today. Extractive, this is conventional with its chemicals, with its factory farms. Okay, we're taking out more than we're putting back. Then there's sustainable, that's number two. That's something like organic, right? We're not using certain pesticides and it's better, but because two thirds of our soil has been degraded

and certain experts estimate, you know, 60, 80 harvests left is all we have until that thin layer of topsoil that we grow our food on is gone. We need to go beyond sustainable. And that's what regenerative agriculture is. Its goal is to take something and return it to a higher or more worthy state. And so when you're a regenerative farmer or producer, you're establishing a relationship with your land where you're paying attention and you're taking it from where it's at and incorporating practices, crop rotation, using animal integration, covering the soil with plants, building the life underneath the soil to create a life explosion, a life above the soil. That's why regenerative agriculture is different.

It's also been shown in certain circumstances to sequester carbon, improve water holding capacity. A lot of problems with water is not that we don't have water, it's that our soil can't hold the water. And so you see stories from regenerative farmers where they're able to capture and hold water. And that means less droughts and fewer floods and fires and all of that. So there's, and biodiversity, exactly. We are trying to segment cow operations, hog operations, chicken operations, growing corn and soy. This is not how it used to be.

When we can get back to those diversified systems and local food systems, that's the direction we need to go. And we also have to recognize there's this massive consolidation in conventional factory farming today and that four companies actually control 85% of the meat market. And that's a really scary place to be. So if we can support regenerative agriculture and know that, yeah, you can integrate animals in highly managed ways that restores ecological function and that you drive the market. And when you understand the differences, you can make choices that help drive the market. And when you understand the differences, you can make choices that help drive that forward, that give those farmers an incentive to transition out of this system that a lot of them are stuck in and to try something different and to try the

thing that we actually need to restore planetary health and human health. Other than documentary, what's next for Paleo Valley? Ooh, we're just going to continue on all of our products. We've got, we have a caramel bone broth coming out. Have you tried it? Ooh, I haven't tried that yet, Susan. Get on that. I'm super excited about it. She's going to go nuts for that.

It may be in our latest supply. I don't know. We'll look. Yes, and we have like a- We're so hooked on the chocolate. Oh, I know. What I do now is a chocolate in my coffee and then i just add a little caramel so it's like a caramel chocolate mocha oh look at that oh my gosh oh my goodness and this is not guys it's not sugar it's not it tastes sweet but it's not sugar trust me there's no glycemic index here yeah no and i also will be publishing a paper.

So I just did my dissertation and talking about the human health implications of beef from various different production systems in North America with Dr. Van Vliet. And so that's coming. And electrolytes and apple cider electrolyte for fall as well is coming. And hot dogs. I'll be looking for it. Oh, hot dogs. Interesting. Healthy hot dogs and i'll be looking for it oh hot dogs interesting healthy hot dogs wow yes fermented hot dogs with wild pastures not fermented but they're going to be grass finished with spices and they were also going into shrimp with wild pastures to wild caught shrimp so yeah just so many things coming andrew grohl has become a very big fan of your guy's stuff,

and he spotted it early. And so we're joining forces with him to help push it out. But appreciate you being here, Autumn. We appreciate, we are so grateful you did this company. We really do. It is a part of our life now. And so thank you for doing so and keep up the great work. Thanks, Dr. Drew.

Such a fan. Always a pleasure. You bet. Thank you, Autumn Smith, everybody. You. Such a fan. Always a pleasure. You bet. Thank you. Autumn Smith, everybody. You can get her at Paleo Valley on X and Instagram. Coming up for us, we have coming, let's get that schedule underway here.

Susan is going to do a thing on Friday at 11 with Emily Hagen. If you know her from the Trailer Park Boys, I believe it was her main big thing. Viva Fry, Emily Kaplan next week. Carrie Lake in a stop by with Posabic. What's that?

Wait, I did not know she was in Trailer Park Boys. What? I think she is. I looked her up and I saw something about Trailer Park Boys. Yep. So you're a big fan of that? Yes. She is.

She's known for Trailer Park Boys in 2016. Okay, go check it out my brothers will be so happy uh jimmy door i'm gonna be at a special event with him salty cracker gonna make a command performance jillian michaels all that following the election maybe we'll actually have some results by then so stay with us uh let's see. This is Wednesday. I'm out tomorrow. I've got to do some expert witness stuff. But we'll be back on the schedule from New York with Viva Fry on October 28th. That, I believe, is Monday. Help me, everybody,

because I think I have Gutfeld on Tuesday, which may take me away. Yeah, that is Monday, Viva Fry. Tuesday, no show. Thursday, Wednesday, Carrie Lake. And then Thursday, maybe just, I'm not sure what that is. I don't think that's me. Susan will be on that day. There's her show.

Keep an eye out for that. It'll be 11 a.m. on Friday, the first one. And then I think around maybe early, early on Thursday, the 31st. But we'll see about that. She's planning some fancy event for Halloween. All right. So as I said, I'll see you on Monday with Viva Fry and Emily Kaplan at three o'clock Pacific time. We'll see you then. Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Caleb Nation and Susan Pinsky. As a reminder, the discussions here are not a substitute for medical care, diagnosis,

or treatment. This show is intended for educational and informational purposes only. I am a licensed physician, but I am not a replacement for your personal doctor, and I am not practicing medicine here. Always remember that our understanding of medicine and science is constantly evolving. Though my opinion is based on the information that is available to me today, some of the contents of this show could be outdated in the future. Be sure to check with trusted resources in case any of the information has been updated since this was published. If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, don't call me. Call 911.

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