Morning Wire - Chronic Crisis: Exposing the Causes of America’s Health Epidemic | 9.29.24

Episode Date: September 29, 2024

A deep discussion with Dr. Casey Means and Calley Means, Co-Founder of Truemed, into how America’s healthcare system profits from chronic illness while neglecting prevention and disease reversal. Get the facts first on Morning Wire.ZBiotics: The drink before drinking with ZBiotics. Get 15% off your order with promo code WIRE at http://www.ZBiotics.com/WireBabbel: For a limited time, get 60% off your Babbel subscription at http://www.babbel.com/wire Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

By the numbers, Americans are getting sicker every year. But in the alternative media sphere, a thriving conversation about the root causes of disease is gaining momentum, demonstrating a profound readiness among regular people to make America healthy again. This past week, a diverse group of heterodox thinkers addressed the Senate about the glaring threats facing American health and the corruption driving them. In this episode, we speak to two experts who are playing a central role in leading the online health revolution. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley. It's September 29th, and this is a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.

Hey guys, producer Brandon here. Black Rifle Coffee helps you wake up each morning feeling dialed in and ready to make the most of your day. And now's your chance to get 20% off your purchase using code Daily Wire at black rifle coffee.com. All of their explosive coffees are roasted right here in the USA by a veteran-led team of expert roasters obsessed with crafting the perfect cup of coffee. Every black rifle purchase makes it possible for Black Rifle Coffee Company to help provide funding, training, and equipment to our nation's military and first responders. Head to their site now for 20% off your purchase with Code Daily Wire. Joining me today are Powerhouse Siblings Dr. Casey Means, Stanford trained ear, nose and throat surgeon, and Callie Means, Harvard Business School trained food lobbyist, and both are now health activists and co-authors of the book Good Energy.

Casey and Callie, thanks for coming on. Absolutely. Now, there's so much to unpack on this topic. And I just first want to mention I saw you, Casey, months ago on Alliebeth Stucky discussing your book. And I immediately ordered it for myself and for my parents. I want to talk about your book, which is fantastic. But first, I want to ask a little bit about how you got into this work. You left a very impressive and potentially very lucrative career as a Stanford trained E&T surgeon to pursue public health from a radically different perspective.

What was it about the way you saw? medicine being practiced in the mainstream system that you felt was so counterproductive and made you want to jump ship. Yeah, at the end of my surgical training as I had a neck surgeon, I was really taking a step back before I launched into my full-blown career as an academic position. And I was looking around me at the trends that are happening in American Health. And what is very clear when you stop and look around is that American Health is getting destroyed in our country. It's getting destroyed across the lifespan. And if you just simply look at some of the statistics about what's happening, with chronic disease in America, you see that the picture is incredibly bleak.

74% of American adults are dealing with overweight or obesity. Close to 40% of children now have overweight or obesity. We've got 52% of American adults. This is close to 140 million American adults that have pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes. These were numbers that were like less than 1% in 1950s of American adults having type 2 diabetes. We've got 30% of teens with prediabetes. We've got one in 36 children nationally with autism. Young adult cancers are skyrocketing,

79% increase in young adult cancers over the past two years. And now one in two American adults is expected to get cancer in their lifetime. We've got 34% of young adults with a mental, emotional, or behavioral disorder, 25% of women on an anti-depressant medication, autoimmune disease is skyrocketing, infertility going up 1% a year. So I could go on and on. The statistics are bleak. As a physician, really at the top of my game, I graduated from Stanford Medical School,

I went into a surgical residency, I'm looking at these stats and thinking, what is going on in American healthcare that is causing astronomical increases in chronic diseases that we know are tied to our diet, our environment, our lifestyle, and no one is talking about it. So that got me to really step back and reevaluate how I wanted to interact with the health care system. And what I realize is that, you know, while there's absolutely a place for surgeons when it comes to acute issues, we did not need one more head and neck surgeon drilling into sinuses and draining press from ears, I really need to go out and actually address the bigger issue that is just plaguing Americans across the lifespan today, which is chronic diseases tied to food that

are largely preventable and reversible and are not being talked about by the health care system. Now, what's interesting is what you hear a lot is that we need more health care and more access to health care. We need cheaper healthcare. But what you're talking about as a solution isn't actually health care at all, at least in the standard sense. Absolutely. So what people need to understand right now is that the largest and fastest growing industry in the United States is the healthcare industry. And the healthcare industry is a business, and it's a business designed to grow. And the way that our health care system currently is incentivized to make money is not to actually cure illness. It is to have more patients in the system, having more things done to them for a longer

period of time. That's the stark, unemotional, economic reality. Now, every single doctor I know, and every single person in health care I know is a good person who went into the field for noble reasons. But the reality is a chronic illness is a cash cow for our health care system. So because of this economic foundation, it actually corrupts all aspects of our health care system from research is done, to how doctors are trained, to how health care is financed. So a lot of the talk goes towards expanding access to health care. But what I would argue is that we need to be devoting an equal or much more attention to how do we actually shift the healthcare systems focus towards really the preventative root

causes of why Americans are getting sick. So it's really about thinking not only about how to get increased access for quality healthcare, to shift the health care systems focus on root causes. Yeah, and, you know, there's no ideology when it comes to health care. You have both sides basically fighting over how to increase access to this system that's fundamentally making more money as more people get sick. That's the problem. The fundamental question with health care should not be how to enable more access to a system

that's profiting from being sick, but how to enable Americans to thrive and prevent and reverse the chronic conditions that make up nine out of ten killers of Americans and take up 95% of health care costs. Ninety five percent of health care costs are tied to preventable lifestyle conditions. Only five percent are acute issues like a broken bone or something that's going to kill you right away. It's chronic conditions. The chronic condition management of the modern health care system has been an utter failure. Rates of every single chronic condition are going up. So fundamentally, politicians on both sides of aisle have been asking the wrong question. The question isn't, how do we have more access to a broken system? The question is, how do we enable Americans to be

healthier? And that is seeing obesity is not an ozimic deficiency. Seeing heart disease is not a stand deficiency. Seeing diabetes is not a metformin deficiency. These are not drug deficiencies. They are core lifestyle habits, and it's nothing short of a moral blind spot, and it's not partisan at all to see medicine as food, as exercise, as core metabolic habits that we can incentivize. And that's what we're really working with members of Congress across the aisle to realize. This is not a partisan issue. It's a corruption issue. Now, something that comes to mind is that other countries with very different health care systems, but similar diets are catching up to us in terms of obesity. For example, I would guess that Canada has a comparable lifestyle and probably comparable obesity.

Well, Canada's not as fat as we are. This is a uniquely American problem. The health disparities between us and Canada are significant when it comes to diabetes rates, when it comes to obesity rates, when it comes to childhood, fatty liver disease rates, 20% roughly of young adults in the United States have fatty liver disease, which would have unthinkable just a generation ago. This is a very important thing for Americans to understand. This is not an entire world problem. Yes, we are exporting our health care standards and nutrition standards around the world

and the whole world that's getting more unhealthy. But this is a pronounced problem in the United States. two times more, at least per capita on health care than Canada and have demonstrably lower life expectancy and health outcomes. So I spent several years working as an emergency department nurse, and I came away with the impression that definitely the vast majority of problems coming in were related to lifestyle, but also that it's really hard to get people to change their lifestyle. There was almost this kind of system-wide resignation that people won't change. How do we address that? I think it's really important for everyone listening to realize that it is systemically indoctrinated

in doctors and health care workers that patients are lazy and that people are noncompliant and they're never going to do the things that doctors say so we might as well just prescribe a pill. I really can't overemphasize how much the system essentially reinforces this idea in health care providers that is so, so wrong. I mean, I think we're seeing with the huge monumental surge of support for the talking points that RFK is talking about around health and that now Trump is talking about, that people absolutely want to make health care a top agenda and people want to be healthy. We believe that Americans want to be healthy, but there are trillions of dollars of industry interests that are rigging our institutions of trust to enable a system that profits off believing

that patients are lazy and people. want to be sick. You look at how doctors are educated. 80% of medical schools in America do not have a single nutrition course, even though nine of the 10 leading causes of death in the United States are tied to nutrition. You look at the NIH. You've got 8,000 researchers with NIH grants having major conflicts of interest with processed food companies and pharma companies. So at every level of research, of education, of media, and so many more aspects of just the, you know, the, you know, foundation of our culture, we plant the seeds that diet and lifestyle don't matter. It's too hard. These diseases are inevitable. It's in your genes. Willpower doesn't matter. You've got Fatima

Cody Stanford from Harvard and Harvard obesity doctor telling people on 60 minutes that willpower doesn't matter when it comes to obesity. This is genetic brain disease. So these disempowering messages coupled with conflicts of interest and lack of education all across the board are creating that reality. But we do not believe that it needs. to be that way. We believe that Americans really do want to be healthy and that the system is rigged against them. And you ask what can be done. And I want to be clear, this isn't not about lecturing people what to eat or how to exercise. It's not about that. It's about getting the standard of care correct. If a woman is facing infertility, PCOS, it's just not medically appropriate to pound her

with a bunch of hormone pills and then get her straight onto the path of the gruesome surgical intervention like IVF, which should absolutely, I think, be available. But that's the standard of care. You know, there's dollar signs when an OBGYN in America sees a woman with PCOS. It's a straight path to IVF, right? Very little is that patient notified that PCOS is on the perspective of insulin resistance. And the greatest reversal for PCOS is a targeted keto diet that works wonders in reversing that and increasing fertility. That is what patients are told in Norway. In Norway, there's a three-step program up to IVF, but first starting with food interventions to see if that can get the fertility issues under control. So it's not about command and control

policy here. You know, frankly, I have no interest in lecturing any American what to eat. But the USDA should not be telling a two-year-old that 10% of their diet can be added sugar and they'd still be healthy. The USDA should not be saying that a child's diet, 93% in ultra-processed food can be healthy. The NIH should not be putting the majority of their research grants to conflicted scientists. The FDA should not be 75% funded by pharma, which greatly impacts how they regulate food and drugs. You have to clean up the conflicts and the scientific guidelines.

And if we had the truth about what food colorings are doing in our cereal, if we had the truth about what glyphosate is actually doing to our microbiomes, if we had the truth about what our industrial agriculture system that's robbing the soil of nutrients to where a tomato has 70% lower nutrient content and key items over the past 50 years compared to a tomato generations ago, if we had the truth on these things, then the policy chips can follow where they may. So that, I think, is what we need to do. We need. to get the corruption out of the science. So both of you have mentioned at certain points that there's sort of a groundswell of interest in this. And Callie, you recently connected RFK and Trump to discuss some of these issues. How did that meeting come about? And what was the takeaway? After our mother died of a preventable condition in 2021, literally at her grave site,

Casey and I talked about making this issue of reversing chronic disease the cause of our lives. And in the past couple of years, we've engaged with over 100 leaders bipartisan across the aisle. And through our advocacy and through writing our book and through starting companies, we've met a lot of people. And two entities that have become very interested in the chronic disease issue are obviously RFK. I mean, the media slurs him and the media delegitimizes him. But RFK has made his life and made his campaign about the macro issue of childhood chronic disease. So we've become close. And then the Trump campaign staff has reached out and asked to talk about chronic disease. President Trump actually gave a very strong statement on child of chronic disease a year ago.

And the campaign has been extremely interested in this topic. And President Trump has talked about it. In the hours after President Trump's assassination attempt against him, as RFK has said, I thought this is going to be secret, but he spilled the beans on this. I gave him a call. And we talked about this spiritual feeling almost that we felt for unity. And RFK was thinking about that a lot. And I was able to talk about that with him and play a small role and facilitating that conversation. For my small vantage point, I can say this.

This was not conversations about horse trading. Nobody was looking at the polling. This was two men speaking for hours about why so many kids are getting diabetes. This was two men speaking about the harm we're doing to our human capital. the military and national security implications with the fact that 77% of 21-year-olds aren't eligible to join the military because of their metabolic health. This is what those two men bonded over, talked about, and I was really blown away at a Trump rally to see comments about regenerative agriculture, getting applause lines, comments about soil health, comments about depoisoning our food supply. These were extremely well received by Donald Trump's voters. they're extremely well received on the left.

And I think we're seeing a moment where this issue of stopping the incentives that are poisoning and then drugging our children are coming to the top of the national conversation. And I think just as I say this is a bipartisan issue, we need to be really clear and congratulate and compliment any politician who brings this issue to the forefront. And we should all be thankful and have gratitude for President Trump and RFK for talking about these issues. Right. But at the same time, it's really interesting that the last legacy media seems to be strangely against these ideas. Can you explain why you think that is and just some examples you've seen? Yeah, when you shift to independent media, when you look at the

best-selling books in the country, when you look at the top podcast in the country, when you look at where Americans are gravitating to when they're not being dictated by corporate interests, they're going to metabolic health. They're asking why something clearly is going wrong with children. They're asking why chronic disease rates among, you know, adults are skyrocketed. They're asking why there's clearly an unprecedented mental health crisis America. They're asking why clearly there's something compromise about our food system. These are the questions that are obvious that Americans are asking. There's a complete and utter lack of curiosity about these questions on the media.

And I think that's dictated by the fact that the pharmaceutical industry, which profits from kids being sicker for longer periods of time, just demonstrably, is the chief funder of news and has co-opted our information sources. I think that's why you see the mainstream media violently attacking independent outlets like The Daily Wire, like Joe Rogan, and like this surge of independent media and how you have European countries now literally trying to jail people that are speaking independently. The shift to our large corporations not being able to control our information sources. This is a historical shift. This is on par with Benjamin Franklin, you know, publishing leaflets around the American Revolution, I think. and there was a war and a continued war.

And as RFK has actually said, the chief topic in America right now is free speech because we need to be able to have these conversations. Just adding on to what Callie is saying about independent media, I think the point is very, very important. Just look at the numbers. You look at a single Joe Rogan experience episode, which is getting 10 to 20 million downloads per episode,

200 million downloads per month, compared to CNN Primetime, which is getting somewhere in the 500,000 to 600,000, views for an episode. It's orders of magnitude larger. And you look at what these independent media podcasters are talking about. They're talking about holistic health. They're talking about functional medicine. They're talking about food as medicine. They're talking about how to be healthy and thrive. So the appetite for this is monumental in our country right now. Unfortunately, that's not reflected on mainstream media. And we believe that this is largely due to who is funding these organizations with

55% of TV news spending coming from pharma and similar industries. Now, you've mentioned a variety of factors beyond just diet, but if you could give a blanket recommendation for improving health through diet alone, what would it be? I think that by design, the dietary philosophy conversation is intended to generate marketing dollars rather than really any meaningful, productive conversation or health. The reality is, if we are eating real, whole unprocessed food, grown in good soil, people will rapidly get healthier. It's avoiding

the industrially manufactured, ultra-processed foods that only really came to market in a ubiquitous way in the 1980s and since then have been destroying human health. So I just think it's important to really pop up from the diet wars and think about what the commonalities that matter are, which is really eating real food. What we're so hardened by, in terms of the conversation that's coming up with RFK is this real discussion of the difference between industrial agriculture and regenerative agriculture, where animal agriculture in the regenerative system, which is a natural, more indigenous type of farming that incorporates animals into the plant life cycle, we know that this is actually fantastic for carbon capture. It's fantastic for

sustainable, both health and environmental impacts. And so, you know, the lack of nuance in the conversation has made it noisy, has made people confused, and is not in the best interest of health. I think what we are really focused on is cutting through the noise to really focus on what matters, which is real food, getting the poison out of our food system, like the dyes, the chemicals, the pesticides, many of which are banned overseas, and to get people eating real food, which is not only good for the environment, but good for human health. One of the academics that President Biden appointed to lead the USDA Nutrition Guideline committee is a chief advisor to beyond beef, this disastrous fake meat that is glyphosate-laden

pea protein covered in canola oil and artificial ingredients. It's not lost on the food industry, and I saw this very clearly working for it, that using hot-button social justice issues like the environmental movement to argue that we shouldn't be eating what our body has naturally evolved to eat over thousands of years, using racial. social justice issues to say that it is absolutely unacceptable to ask a parent to not poison their child with alter processed food. You know, obviously getting now into food companies funding body positive influencers on TikTok to pressure doctors not to weigh patients anymore. Pulling the strings of these social justice and environmental hot topics is a well-known tactic from the food industry.

And you just have to use common sense when folks like Bill Gates, who's the largest funder of these ultra-processed fake meat companies and the largest owner of farmland in America is literally saying that it's not sustainable to eat natural food that we must have web-grown meat. He's literally working on initiatives to block the sun, saying the sun is dangerous to us. I mean, we're really, really backwards. The sun is good. Naturally raised food is good. Sleep is good.

Movement is good. Reducing chronic stress for our kids is good. these are the foundations of health. When we're thinking about health care policy, we need to be incentivizing and spurring these basic habits among Americans. We do the opposite and then profit by drugging them once people basically poison themselves. Right. Now, I want to talk about the book that you published in the past year.

Tell us about good energy. Good energy is a book that, as Callie mentioned, we committed to writing in really the moments after my mother passed away from preventable chronic illness. After 40 years of missed warning signs that doctors at what people would call the best health institutions in the world had just missed. They hadn't put the pieces together and she ultimately died far too soon. And the vision for this book is to help Americans understand the root causes of why we are all getting sick right now and really inspired change from the bottom up and also present some top down solutions from the policy perspective.

So in the book, what we talk about is the key point that is the biggest blind spot in American healthcare, which is that every single chronic disease, torturing and shortening American lives are rooted in the exact same thing, which is metabolic dysfunction, a concept that is finally getting some more airtime, but it's what the science has been pointing us to for decades, that these diseases that we tend to silo into separate specialties because of the structure of our reactive health care system. So the Alzheimer's patient sees the neurologist. The patient with obesity sees the primary care doctor. The patient with type two diabetes sees a necronologist. The patient with the neurologist, the patient with heart disease and hypertension. They see

the cardiologist. The infertility, it's the OBGYN. They're all on different medications. They're all getting different procedures. What the science is actually telling us is that inside the body, inside the cells, all of these conditions are rooted in many of the exact same things, which is metabolic dysfunction, which is caused by our toxic diet and lifestyle that has changed rapidly over the past 100 years. And it's actually quite straightforward to dig our way out of this mess if we understand what we're actually fighting, which is metabolic dysfunction. We're not actually dealing with 20, 30, 40 different diseases of completely different physiology. We're dealing with, by and large, a single problem caused by our environment. And so the most efficient way to help

Americans get healthy is to inspire them to understand their metabolic health. inspire them to understand what factors of our environment and our lifestyle and our food are destroying our metabolic health across the lifespan and to give them tools to monitor it and improve it over time. I love that concept. Now, final question. What's your overall message to the government or maybe just the general public about how we can turn these trends around? I think what we're seeing right now is that members of Congress and many people on the left and the right from mega voters to hippies are seeing that we've kind of just been blinded by what's happening, particularly to kids. I mean, this is an emergency or else the stats are just wrong about what's happening to kids. But I think what voters are seeing

is that there is something really wrong. And I think, frankly, the defining trend of our history right now around the world is this populist uprising about voters around the world feeling like something isn't quite right. And I think there is a real opportunity here for bypass and change. And these incentives can be changed very quickly. You know, the three-tier framework I have for immediate policy change is get the corruption out of scientific guidelines. Just as a start, cut pharma funding to the FDA, cut food industry funding to the USDA, get corruption out of the scientific guidelines so we get the truth.

Number two, stop incentivizing toxic crap. We do not need to talk about taxes or bans. I don't think Coke should cease to exist. but I also don't think Coke should be getting $10 billion a year of food stamp spending. That is public policy insanity. And number three is open up flexibility with where health care dollars can go. It is just not appropriate that somebody with pre-diabetes just immediately one-size-fits-all gets metformin.

They should be able to use their medical dollars on food interventions and exercise interventions with things like HSA dollars, which is just clinically often the best road to go. If we incentivized the clinically appropriate intervention, which is often exercise food supplementation, we would be a healthier country. Americans follow incentives. I just would second what Callie said. I think a real message that we have for people is that even though things seem pretty bleak right now, almost everyone I know, including myself, has a first degree relative dealing with a chronic illness somewhere across the lifespan from infants to the elderly.

And it is not that complicated to get our way out of this mess. And so Callie spoke about the three-tiered approach to fixing policy. This has reduced the overt conflicts of interests. This is improve education to doctors and healthcare practitioners and get clean science in front of our practitioners. And the third is to incentivize healthy choices. And I think from the physician perspective, it is equally simple. We need to use our common sense and our intuition about what is healthy for us

and get back to really believing in the absolute miraculousness of our lives and of the privilege of being here as humans having this amazing human experience. I think really when it comes down to it, the hundreds of thousands of papers on PubMed telling us how to be healthy, boil down into a few simple principles. We need to eat real food. We need to stop getting 70% of our calories

from ultra-processed industrially manufactured foods. We got to get the toxins out of the food, the pesticides, the additives, the colorings, the preservatives that are many of what you're illegal elsewhere around the world. We need to get moving. We can't sit in a chair all day and our house is in the dark. We got to get back into the sunshine. We got to move our bodies. We've got to manage our stress. We've got to get off our devices 10 hours a day and interact with other people. We need to get some good sleep. Those factors right there. I mean, we wrote a 400 page book about why there is science to support how all of those

improve our cellular health. But it really is that simple. And so for people feeling confused, overwhelmed about the fringe issues and the margins of the details. If we get back to some of the basics, America will transform. We will radically reclaim our health. And again, I believe, become the most prosperous, healthy, thriving competitive country in the world. Well, that's a fabulous place to end. And I love the message of hope that you're bringing because I think when we see these graphs of Americans getting sicker and sicker, people get demoralized. But what you're saying is this can be reversed and it can be reversed relatively quickly. Absolutely.

Casey and Callie, thank you so much for coming on. Wonderful. Well, thanks so much. That was Dr. Casey Means and Callie Means, health experts and authors of good energy. And this has been a Sunday edition of Morning Wire. Hey guys, producer Brandon here. I've been learning to speak German with Babel and I can't wait until I visit Germany and easily order my favorite German cuisine.

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