Realfoodology - Big Food and Pharma Are Keeping Us Sick: Subsidies, Ozempic, & EBT | Calley Means

Episode Date: February 4, 2025

231: In this episode, I sit down with Calley Means, co-founder of TruMed, to talk about how our food and healthcare systems are stacked against us. Calley shares his insider perspective from years of consulting for major food companies, revealing how food subsidies, misleading studies, and the tactics of Big Food and Big Pharma have led to a system that keeps us unhealthy. We dive into the shocking truth about food stamp-funded junk food, how processed foods are driving chronic disease, and why it’s time to shift towards viewing food as medicine. This conversation will leave you fired up and ready to take action! Topics Discussed: Calley’s background and the founding of TruMed   The impact of food subsidies on our food system   The manipulation behind corrupt health studies   Big Food’s role in misleading the public   Why pizza is considered a vegetable in schools   The rise of chronic diseases and our broken healthcare system   Ozempic and Big Pharma’s focus on managing, not curing, illness   The power of regenerative farming   Practical tips for making healthier food choices and supporting sustainable agriculture Sponsored By:  SuppCo Get 100% free access today at supp.co/REALFOODOLOGY.   Timeline Go to timelinenutrition.com/REALFOODOLOGY and use code REALFOODOLOGY for 10% off Our Place Use code REALFOODOLOGY for 10% off at fromourplace.com Function  Skip Function’s waitlist at www.functionhealth.com/realfoodology  Timestamps:  00:00:00 - Introduction  00:07:49 - Calley’s background 00:10:39 - Consulting for big food  00:13:41 - Corrupt studies 00:18:13 - PB & J study and TUFTS food compass 00:25:18 - Why food companies fund studies 00:27:04 - How did we get here?  00:33:04 - Misplacing trust in our health care system  00:36:24 - Food Is Medicine  00:43:15 - The Ozempic debate  00:49:21 - Rise in chronic diseases  00:53:02 - Surgery and prescription drugs 01:00:14 - Food subsidies  01:05:01 - Advice for a healthier life  01:08:12 - Regenerative farming  01:09:25 - Calley’s health nonnegotiables  Check Out Calley: Truemed Instagram Twitter Buy Good Energy by Calley & Casey Means Check Out Courtney:  LEAVE US A VOICE MESSAGE Check Out My new FREE Grocery Guide! @realfoodology www.realfoodology.com My Immune Supplement by 2x4 Air Dr Air Purifier AquaTru Water Filter EWG Tap Water Database  Produced By: Drake Peterson

On today's episode of the Real Foodology podcast. Pharma and the food are really connected because we're clearly demonstrably getting sick from food and we can really dive into that. But I think the real shameful part is that the medical industry does financially profit when there's more patients that are sick to treat and working on a company now to change those incentives and just really think it's the biggest issue in the world. Hi friends, welcome back to another episode of the Real Foodology podcast. incentives and just really think it's the biggest issue in the world. Hi friends, welcome back to another episode of the Real Foodology Podcast.

I am Courtney Swan, your host. I am so excited about this episode. Oh my gosh. I'm so excited. I said, oh my gosh for the first time and I have no idea how long. I have such a fire lit under my ass right now. I sat down with the co-founder of TrueMed, which is a payment integration that enables qualified customers to use pre-tax HSA

and FSA funds to purchase health promoting products or services from their favorite merchants. So essentially people that are on food stamps can go to their doctor and their doctor can write them a note that will give them tax incentive for foods and lifestyle changes like exercise that are actually health promoting, that are actually good for us. Kelly Means is my guest today and he goes more into detail about this, but just to give you a little snippet of it, 40.2% of Coca-Cola's US revenue comes from SNAP benefits.

So that's food stamps. 40% of Coca-Cola's U.S. revenue comes from SNAP benefits. So that's food stamps. 40% of Coca-Cola's revenue. That is insane. So he has set out to change that with his company, TrueMed. He's also just an amazing voice in this, for lack of a better word, fight that we are in right now with our healthcare system and our food system. This is something that I am so incredibly passionate about.

It is one of the main driving reasons that I started Real Foodology in the first place is this desire to pull the blindfold off of the American public about the corruption that's happening in our food system and in our health care system. So we just dive straight into it. Callie actually used to work as a consultant for a lot of these big food companies. And I love when this happens. He has an inside scoop in what is actually happening behind closed doors and these large food corporations and

healthcare companies and where the funding is going and he's literally seen the tactics that they use to confuse the general public. They, meaning these big food corporations as well as big pharma are using pages straight out of the tobacco playbook. They're using the same PR that tobacco used when they were fighting for the regulations that were being put on tobacco. So Callie and I dive into that. We talk about how the system is rigged, subsidies that are being paid for corn, wheat and soy, and how these corporations are incentivized to keep us sick.

How we got to this place where the NIH is funding universities like Tufts to release a new food pyramid that says that Lucky Charms and glyphosate-laden Cheerios are healthier than eggs and ground beef. Can you tell that I'm so fired up about this? It drives me insane. And when I first started learning about all of this, I would say like 12 years ago, it's what made me start real foodology. I remember learning back in the day that there is a policy in place for schools when they are thinking about the foods that they are

serving to children in schools. They actually consider pizza to be a vegetable because they say that the tomato sauce and the pizza acts as a vegetable. And so they can serve pizza to kids and say that they're serving them a vegetable. I mean, it's crazy and it's all funded by these big food corporations that have vested interest to get children addicted to their foods early so then they become customers for life. I'm fired up as you can tell.

And I'm so excited for you guys to hear this episode. I was just so honored to have Kelly Means on my podcast to talk all about this. He talks a lot about what's happening right now in our food system and what is keeping us sick and the corporations behind that that are being incentivized to keep us sick. And I know this all sounds like doom and gloom, but we also talk a lot about what you as the listener and the consumer can do on a personal level so that we can change this. This can be incredibly empowering if you let it be. So don't let this be discouraging to you.

Just know that there is a lot of good people out there that are doing good things with their food. And there's a lot of people that want to do good by the American public. So please don't let this allow you to be discouraged. Let it light a fire under your ass. Like let's get involved here. Let's put our money into companies and farmers and people that we know are doing us right by our food system and that actually care about our health

because this is how we get out of the state that we're in right now where only 7% of the American population is metabolically healthy. 7%, that means 93% of the American population is metabolically healthy. 7%, that means 93% of the American population is unhealthy, but we can change that and we can change this now. We have the tools, we have the resources, we have the information, it's just about educating everyone and get everyone fired up and we can do this guys,

we can do this. Anyways, I wanna get to the episode because I'm so excited for you to hear it. As always, if you are loving the podcast, please take a moment to rate and review it. It means so much to me. It really helps support the podcast and it helps get the podcast into more ears.

So thank you so much and write me on Instagram, tag me at realfoodology. Let me know if you loved the episode. Thanks so much. Well, friends, we have officially hit the new year, which means that I'm sure we all have New Year's resolutions Now I'm not really big on New Year's resolutions however, I do see the new year as a way to

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I got my fiance on it. If you want to skip Function's wait list, go to www.functionhealth.com slash realfoodology. That is functionhealth.com slash realfoodology. Callie, I was saying before we started recording that just how excited I've been about recording this episode because what you are talking about and revealing to the general public is something that I am so passionate and so fired up about. So first of all, I just want to honor you and say thank you so much for all the amazing

work that you're doing right now because it is so needed. So thank you. Thank you so much. I'm so proud to be in the fight with you and others just trying to bring light on I think the biggest issue in the world right now, which is our food system. Yes. Okay. So for people that are unaware of you and the work that you're doing, this is such an

important part of your story. Can you tell people how you got started and how were you in these rooms getting the inside scoop into what's actually happening with our food industry? Yeah. So I grew up in Washington, D.C. So a lot of people say they're from DC or from Maryland or Virginia, I was born and raised in the swamp. And from an early age, thought I was going to be in politics, went out to school at Stanford

and California, but studied economics, started political science, went right back to DC and, and went on some campaigns, I would call myself pretty ideological wanted to really push forward American competitiveness. And it was distressing to see everyone really in politics from the left and the right, they get in there for the right reasons. And then inevitably, you're getting consulting after the campaigns are over. And the biggest spenders in Washington, as I quickly learned, are pharma number one, and pharma spends five times more on lobbying than the oil industry three times more than any other industry in America and then food.

These are two of the most highest employed industries in the country, two of the largest industries in the country and the two big players in DC. So I found myself across the table from special interests primarily pharma and food. Got out of that and got more into entrepreneurship. In the past several years, it's really all clicked. The dots have connected. Having a new son, seeing my mom pass away from a pancreatic cancer, which is highly tied to metabolic dysfunction, to pre-diabetes.

The doctors said it was random. Oh, such bad luck. People that have Alzheimer's, bad luck. It's like, no, such bad luck, and people that have Alzheimer's, bad luck. It's like, no, you trace this story. You trace what really is causing the increase in all these diseases. It's highly tied to really prediabetes, diabetes,

metabolic dysfunction. And having a new son going into this world that's looking at what's happening with kids, 25% of teens having prediabetes, which is just unthinkable, really traced and started asking about these incentives. And coming up with this thesis that pharma and the food are really connected, because we're clearly demonstrably

getting sick from food. And we can really dive into that. But I think the real shameful part is that the medical industry does financially profit when there's more patients that are sick to treat and working on a company now to change those incentives and just really think it's the biggest issue in the world. Yeah, absolutely.

So you're speaking out about this now from a lens of knowing what's going on truly in these rooms behind closed doors. What were you doing before you were consulting for big food companies, right? Like Coca-Cola and so you've seen the playbook that they They throw out. Yeah, and it's so You know, it's so normalized, you know, I didn't even totally realized at the time

But um, you know in the same week, you know, we'd be working for coca-cola You know, i've talked about how um, you know 2011 2012 when I was working for them, it was an explicit goal to keep food stamp funding, SNAP funding as it's called, for soda. And back then it's like, well, we need to give people choice. We can't take a nanny stay, take the coke away. It's all framed in this nice way. But what was in reality happening is an all out assault

to keep billions of government funding for the key nutrition program for lower income Americans flowing to sugar water. It's still to this day, tragically, 10% of SNAP funding goes to soda. Back then when I was working for Coke, and it's very disparaging, the key question is how do we rig institutions of trust and Coke funded civil rights organizations, leading civil rights organizations, both on the national level, the NAACP, NAACP, but in New York, Philadelphia, where they were combating soda taxes, you had a real effort to racialize the debate, quite frankly, which paying millions of dollars

to civil rights groups, which is, to me, very perverse because lower income communities are absolutely being crushed by metabolic dysfunction. And then I think even to me, potentially more shockingly, is we steered millions of dollars to medical groups. During that time, when I was working for Soda and the American Beverage Association and Processed Food Companies, soda companies were able to donate millions of dollars to the American Diabetes Association. That's nuts. Like, let's not even...

The American Diabetes Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics. Let's just take the American Diabetes Association. Those of us who might not know how important these groups are, they really set the standards for the standard of care. If you are treating diabetes and go against the American Diabetes Association, or God forbid, our pediatrician and go against the American Academy of Pediatrics, you're in real trouble.

It's a real problem. And they really set the standard of care in both of those groups. The preeminent pediatrician group and the preeminent diabetes groups accepted millions of dollars from food companies. The American Diabetes Association had a Coke logo on their website. And it's just shameful, because what you should have is these groups shouting an alarm bell about the metabolic dysfunction and this weaponized sugar water that we're drinking, which is

you know, biologically evolutionary and presidented. But no, we were buddying up and I was helping in watching donations flow to those medical groups. It's just crazy. And I tell people this all the time that we need to be educated on what's really happening because it is and it's an assault on us. And I tell people this all the time highly palatable, highly addictive food like products. And what you were just saying reminds me of it's straight out of the tobacco playbook. I mean, I've been saying this for years and I've heard you say this too, where back in

the day they got PR firms and they got doctors to say smoking is fine for you. In fact, it's healthy for you, do it while you're pregnant. And now we're doing the same thing with food and we're essentially telling people, oh, it's totally fine. You can have a coke every day. And just as long as you exercise and you work it out, you work out, you're going to burn it off. This is so insane to me.

In fact, I don't know. My listeners know this story about me. So I actually started on the dietetic track because I wanted to be an RD. The reason that I stopped that track and I went down a more holistic route was because I saw that Eat Right, the dietetic association, they're taking funding from Coca-Cola, General Mills, all of these large food corporations that are supposed to have our back.

And they're taking money from the very companies that are contributing to these chronic diseases like obesity, diabetes, etc. that we're dealing with. Yeah, I mean, Mark Hyman, who's had a big inspiration on me and has, you know, we've been working with our company, wrote a book called Food Fix, which dives deep into that. Dr. Robert Lustig, I think another warrior, Metabolical and Hacking of the American Brain, and they really outline some of these stories on particularly the nutrition groups groups and it's just so interesting hearing hearing that story It's just it's really you wouldn't believe it and I think that I think the word What did you say brainwashing? I think that's a good word. I was actually just kind of connected to dots I was reading a book about like Maoist China and I like literally like some of the tactics to like make people question

The reality that's clearly right in front of them. It's Orwellian. I mean, you still to this day have studies from leading universities calling into question whether sugar causes obesity. And you have thousands of those studies. There were 40 over 45,000 nutrition studies conducted between 2020 and 2022, peer reviewed on PubMed if you search nutrition studies.

And I really do, in retrospect, think it is out of a Maoist playbook on brainwashing. It's a systematic effort to have people questioning manifest reality. I think what's very interesting, thinking about about this now from the top down is humans and actually animals we've domesticated and feed are the only animals that have chronic obesity, that have chronic metabolic dysfunction, right? Actually animals are born with this innate sense. You watch a beautiful child being born, they have a predisposition to natural food, they're moving all the time, They want to be out in the sun. There's no, you know, obesity crisis among giraffes or lions in the wild.

The only animals that are having these issues are ones where the experts and humans are basically getting involved. You know, it's basically humans and our dogs. I should just go into a rabble where there's a diabetes crisis among dogs. I think it's like over 50% of dogs have depression, over 50% of dogs over 10 have cancer. It's like any animal that touches processed food

that we're making is having a real issue and being incentivized for a sedentary lifestyle. We don't need those experts. The problem that we have is there doesn't need to be 45,000 nutrition studies, I believe, basically gas lighting people. And there's this debate. I talk about seed oils now, which

are industrial byproducts created in the past 100 years. And I get tits from the Ivy League crew, from the medical establishment. Well, we don't have enough evidence-based research on whether... It's like this is created by Rockefeller in the early 1900s as a use of industrial byproduct. It's a brand new invention. We're not biologically made to ingest now the number one

source of US fat. It's like we're in this totally like bizarre world where we now have to defend that with these rigged studies. It's like we need to get back to basics. Yes. And I'm so glad that you brought this up. Actually last night I did a deep dive on a bunch of your tweets, which are amazing, by the way.

And the one that I found was you were talking about a study that was done on PB&J, and it was a PB&J on white bread, by the way. And they found in this study that a PB&J increases life expectancy while eggs and meat decrease the life expectancy. And then you dove into it a little bit deeper and you saw that it was funded by Unilever, who is the owner of guess what, Skippy Peanut Butter. Well, many of us are not, but many are scratching their heads

wondering why everyone's so confused on how to eat well. And it's because we have all these huge corporations with are healthier for you when in reality they're just like you said they're gas lighting us they're lying to us another thing I want to dive into and I'm sure you have things you want to say this but it's all kind of connected is the the Tufts food compass that just came out funded by the NIH saying that lucky charms and glyphosate-laden Cheerios are better for us than ground beef right what is happening yeah you hit on two I think crucial points there so so so I think'll do this food compass next, but first, I think it's two different strategies that I saw and I think they're being executed to perfection. Number one is this absurdity, right? The PB&J study. I don't know, you've probably seen like where there was this big brouhaha about gas stoves. Oh my god. There's national news about gas stoves. Not mentioning that autoimmune conditions, allergies, diabetes, fatty liver disease are

exploding among children and maybe we should be worried about what's being cooked on those stoves. No, no, no. We should be worried about gas stoves. And then there was a recent study making the rounds last week that soda increases testicle size or something. It's just like, and everyone's saying, oh, ha ha ha. It's like, it's like, and that was going all over Twitter.

But sitting in a PR office, right, where the Coke and processed food companies have literally billions of dollars they're spending on lobbying and other kind of public affairs PR activities. This is very well known what they're doing. The strategy is distraction, right? It's actually, we can all just kind of imagine, right? Imagine you had a billion dollars and you wanted to kind of weaponize the debate

and distract from what's actually happening, which is everyone is, you know, eight of the 10 largest killers in America are preventable food-based conditions and we're being brought to our knees by metabolic conditions caused by food. How do you want to distract them? It's not that complicated.

You fund a bunch of studies. You just have a steady stream of distracting news articles. You have a bunch of experts saying different things and confusing people. This is what's happening. That's what I put in that lever. There's a huge strategy to just fund distraction. And then of course, food and farm which you can get into, which ties into this, I think, are some of the chief funders of entertainment. Food is the number one spender on Nickelodeon. They actually, food companies and Nickelodeon,

Viacom and other kids channels aggressively lobby the FTC to allow sugary foods to be advertised to kids. So they own a lot of the news networks, they own a lot of the things and that really influenced the data. Now then the tough foods compass. Now I think this gets a little bit more serious. There's the systematic distraction, but then we have the tough food compass and the tough food compass is the preeminent study

in recent years from the National Institute of Health. You know, this has the seal of the NIH on it. The NIH, you know, what did literally like, you know, you talk about folks being confused It's like we should be able to depend on the NIH as an unimpeachable source, right? But the NIH which by the way isn't actually government bureaucrats that are non-partisan the NIH 90% of their money is actually grant making and 80% of their money is actually grant making. And overwhelmingly, their grants go to, the nutrition grants go to professors and researchers that are heavily conflicted.

That happened here too. So it's an NIH grant jointly with food companies, including Danone, that also funded millions of dollars into the same study. This study has tens of thousands of food extremely convoluted And I was recently because we've caught a lot of attention to this and Joe Rogan's talked about it and and Fox News Fox News is the only whatever you think of them is the only network that will even touch issues It's not on the right. It's actually a lot of independent folks and and and folks on the right You're so getting a lot of attention. So the guy

and focus on the right. So getting a lot of attention. So the guy, the study's author called me and kind of trying to talk it down a little bit. And he's like, I just asked him. I said, you got millions of dollars from food companies. You've received personal payments, not even research funding, direct personal payments from food companies. Does this have any influence?

Absolutely not. Absolutely not. And I said, he's like, you know, they're a milk maker. So I pulled up the study. And they had milks listed, different types of milk. And above grass-fed Greek yogurt, above A2 dairy, above any type of milk, the number one rated milk was chocolate almond milk. Chocolate almond milk and chocolate that was above any other dairy in America. That was the NIH state chocolate almond milk

processed. Who's the number one maker in the world of chocolate almond milk? The head funder of the study. And he's telling me it's that. So it's like that's just that's just defined. You know, we're back to the Orwellian thing. You know, the studies all say, you know, we had a wall between you're telling you're asking us to believe that food companies are spending billions of dollars on research, which is what they're doing. And they're not expecting that they're just trying to advance nonpartisan, nonbiased scholarship. But just diving in a little bit more.

And there's been a lot of talk about this food, but it really is, this is not a mischaracterization. Cheerios, which I think is so much glyphosate, it's not even legal in some countries, are rated as high as quinoa. This study's authors said that highly processed grains, that they're fortified with these vitamins, it's very problematic in the highly processed grains, or they're fortified with these vitamins is very problematic in the highly processed grains or take all the fiber out nutritional

value. They said it's just the same as quinoa, a whole grain organic quinoa. So that's point number one. I just want to make kind of one other quick point about that food compass. It's kind of funny almost how ridiculous this is that Lucky Charms are three times healthier than an egg and all this stuff. Okay, the system's corrupt. We get it. Here's the problem. And I saw this close up. This has disastrous real world implications. And the studies authors like, well, you know, this is just science and you've taken some things out of context and there's some serials rated low. No, no, no, no, that doesn't matter. Every cereal company understands that like the the Reese's Puffs might rate low. But every single cereal company had cereals that were rated encouraged.

I think it was like several dozen cereals, processed cereals. So what happens? Why are the food companies funding this study? In the press release before it got pushed back a year and a half ago It said the premier purpose of this study was to influence quote childhood marketing and nutrition guidelines That was the express purpose of the study So what happens you have this study from the NIH and Tufts nutrition school? There are the food companies debating the nuance of that. No, they're going to school boards and Literally arguing that they should

be serving Lucky Charms instead of eggs. That's the whole point of the study. And that's how these studies and the research is being weaponized. And it's the criminal thing here. You know, you kind of understand institutions arguing for their interests, but this is causing devastation to children. One thing I've realized is that there's so much confusing information out there and it's is causing devastation to children. thousand products and gives you real tips on what's working and what's not. Subco showed me how many products rank across their trust score, quality rating system, how much I'm spending, and they even gave me doctor built supplement plans that I could follow. Here is the best thing about it. Subco doesn't care whether you buy any supplements or not.

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I've heard you talk about this, that you recently had a son, right? Yes. Yeah, and that's kind of your driving concern, which I'm there with you. I don't have kids yet, but you know, when you look at the stats and you see that they're saying the first time in history that this next generation may not outlive their parents. That's insane. That's insane. And at what point are we going to stop and start holding these corporations accountable for what they're doing? Because they are the ones that are proliferating this.

And how did we get to this place where we are allowing these corporations to fund these studies to say that, oh yeah, my product is superior to ground beef and eggs just because I say so and I have enough money to say that. And also, I want to know how did we get to this point in society where people are even falling for this? Because I think about this from, you take a step back for a second and you really think about it and you're like, how could sugary chocolate almond milk that's highly processed be better for us than just dairy that came out of a cow or how could

lucky charms possibly be healthier for us than ground beef how have we gotten to this place like it's it's maddening yeah so I think this is where it ties to health care. So I think it's a very important question. How did we get to this place? There's some quotes from economists. It's like, you show the incentive, you can explain anything. So health care is now the largest and the fastest

growing industry in the United States. More people are employed by the health care industry than any other industry. And it still has a semblance of trust, although that's very deservedly eroding, I think. So I'll just give a quick kind of theory of how this all happened. So it has a lot to do with healthcare. So in 1960, 0% of healthcare dollars

were spent on managing chronic conditions. The first chronic condition treatment was the birth control pill right around 1960. By that I mean a pill or a treatment you would take for a sustained period of time. So when we think about medical miracles, when we think about the medical miracles that really have extended life expectancy, it's almost universally acute treatments invented before 1960. By acute, I mean a treatment for something that was probably going to imminently kill

you. before 1916, by acute I mean a treatment for something that was probably gonna imminently kill you, such as infection or childbirth used to be very dangerous. Actually, I think one of the most deadly things a person could do in 1900, it was like several percentages death rate. I mean, it was absolutely crazy. So emergency surgical and various procedures for childbirth, burst appendix, et cetera, et cetera.

And then some people quite big scenes and antibiotics, some acute issues. Today, 90 plus percent of dollars go to managing chronic conditions. So what we realized in 1960 is that if you can treat and manage something for a lifetime, it's recurring revenue. So actually, Arthur Sackler, the grandfather of the folks that did Purdue Pharma and the opiates,

actually was the genius on this. He was in the 60s. He was the marketer for Pfizer. And he actually said, how do we create more chronic things and value them in this class of drugs like that for mental things started becoming popular. And by the end of the 1960s, 30% of US women were on valium and into the 70s. And now today, we've siloed chronic diseases into all these different things.

So what we don't realize is that it's been a disaster. As we've siloed and treated chronic conditions that are caused by food, all the conditions have gone up. So we prescribe more STADIs and heart disease goes up. We prescribe more metformin. Diabetes goes up. We prescribe more SSRIs. Obviously, depression is going up. We prescribe more STADIs and heart disease goes up. We prescribe more metformin, diabetes goes up. We prescribe more SSRIs, obviously depression is going up. We prescribe more blood pressure.

So you just go down the list of the top drugs. They're all basically siloing and treating what's essentially the same thing, which is metabolic dysfunction caused by food. And I think what that's led, what those incentives have led to is an explosion of the healthcare industry because it hasn't worked, right? If you literally just get people and fix our food system, there wouldn't be, there'd be almost no diabetes. You could theoretically wipe out, literally,

heart disease and diabetes if you took processed sugar, seed oils, and highly processed grains out of the American diet. So there's no talk about that. Most doctors graduate from Harvard, Stanford, or anywhere don't even understand that fact. So the incentives of this system, you know, and it's like the medical system, oh, we're creating standards, we're creating these drugs,

we're helping people. But nobody's asking, including the NIH, which is just fully kind of tied to the incentives as well, which we can dig into. Nobody's asking why people have gotten so sick. Nobody's questioning why worldwide we'd spend a trillion dollars in standards and heart disease rates are still exploding. It's just like, they've taken no responsibility for the fact that people are getting sick. So that's a key thing, I think. It's that the medical systems that we would assume are asking why people are getting sick aren't.

They're profiting off people getting sick. And that's not an impugment of anyone's individual motives. I know a lot of great doctors, we all do. There's a lot of dedicated people in the system. But it has led to a complete moral blind spot where very few medical leaders are ringing the alarm bell. Right now, today, the USDA nutrition guidelines says that a two-year-old, their diet can be 10% added sugar. An addictive drug that's highly, I do not

see the NIH and the head of Harvard Med School and all the medical leaders. If they got together and every medical leader, the same way they were ringing the alarm bell on a pharmaceutical product on COVID, I mean, if there was one voice, people listen to medical leaders, actually. When they told us to take the COVID vaccine, 85%,

I think percent 90 percent of Americans you know got it one at least one it's like when the surgeon general said to that smoking is bad in the 1980s very late smoking rates plummeted when we said in the 1990s that you know the food pyramid disasters advice to eat more carbs we eat a lot more carbs it's like we actually like if there was medical unanimity to lower recommended sugar, it should be zero for kids. It should be zero for adults. I don't think sugar should be illegal, but I don't think there should be a USDA recommendation

for allotted alcohol. I don't think there should be a USDA recommendation for that 10% of your calories should be alcohol or marijuana. This is a drug. The government guidelines should be zero. But the incentives of healthcare have allowed the food companies to run amok. And understandably, the food companies want food to be more addictive and cheaper. Absolutely. I tell people this all the time that once you really understand that these food corporations do not have your best health in mind, once you really, really get that, then all of this starts making sense.

Because I think a lot of people have this misconception that, one, that if it's on the shelf, that it's totally safe and fine to eat and vetted for, which is completely not true. with their health in mind, but they're not. executive working for a pharma company suddenly is like on the board for the FDA, you know, and vice versa. It's like there's no checks and balances for any of this. Yeah, it's worse. It's worse than you think. And I think you hit on I think an important point which is distressing but but I actually hope the message people take and folks take and is empowerment out of this. Because I think actually understanding, it's kind of licensed to actually think for yourself here

and understand that we do have an innate ability, I think, to understand strife for us and understand, but that things are not right. But I think, and you asked, it kind of gets to why this has happened. I think we have understandably defer and trust institutions, the medical institutions. And I think that's really potentially defer and trust institutions, the medical institutions. And I think that's really potentially where we've gone wrong.

I mean, I can tell you a Harvard study and Harvard, just to pick on them for a little bit, it's like, you know, can't have a more elite say than that a Harvard medical study, they produced the foundational studies saying sugar didn't cause obesity paid for by the Sugar Research Council. It's like these documents, I'll just say it direct, a document on pharmaceutical products or a document on nutrition, it's a public relations document.

You talk about the revolving door, of course the former FDA administrator is now the head of the board of Pfizer. I mentioned that the NIH is primarily a grant makingmaking organization with essentially no rules on conflict of interest to the grants they make. Even NIH employees are able to take outside consulting funds from pharmaceutical companies. There's absolutely complete and utter toothless. And again, it's just asking us to believe

that somebody that's trying to pay their mortgage and send their kids to private school aren't influenced by hundreds of thousands of dollars from a company when they say that there's no conflict. It's like the former Dean of Yale Law School, there was a report a couple years ago, was paid over a million dollars for basically doing nothing from pharma companies. He went to like one meeting a year. It's like, it's like, it's like kind of asking us to believe like crazy things about like the rules of, of economics not working. And you know, I hope yeah, I hope that does empower people to kind of kind of question it's basic but

questioning what a what a study says and using common sense. Yeah. And I'm so glad that you brought that up because I am always careful to bring this up whenever I talk about, you know, whenever I have conversations like this because I don't ever want someone leaving listening to something like this feeling disempowered because like you said, it's very empowering. I actually find it incredibly empowering.

And I was telling you before we were recording that when I was prepping for this, I just had a fire under my ass. I was so excited because once we know all of this and we reveal all of it to the general public, the more that we know, the better we can do. And we can hold these companies accountable. We can vote with our dollars.

Stop putting money in these corporations like Coca-Cola or just to name one, but these corporations that you knowCola or, you know, just to name one, these corporations that you know that are not doing us good and start putting your money back into the farmers that are actually creating really healthy foods for us that nourish our body. And this is how we have the power. And I find it also incredibly empowering to know that a lot of what we learn in mainstream is actually not true.

Like what you were saying earlier about the chronic diseases. We can completely wipe this out, you know, just because your diabetes runs in your family does not mean that you're going to get it. And I find that incredibly empowering. 100%. And I think there's two levels to this. And I've been, you know, really have so much gratitude for talking to you and just being on this journey,

meeting other fighters in this space. And my theory of change, I guess I'll give a little bit of my... you and just being on this journey meeting other fighters in this space. And my theory of change, I guess I'll give a little bit of my... As I said, I grew up kind of conservative, loving American greatness on food and pharma and defending it. And as I mentioned, some health issues, I had some... My mom passing away, my sister, I didn't mention who was a physician of pride of the family, kind of all the good stamps you could have, Stanford med school, top of her class, surgeon.

She abruptly left surgery, a real kind of moment for the family. I was like, what the heck are you doing here on the up and up? She really brought me along to the fact that she was doing surgery on folks and had no idea why they were under a knife for a second time in six months, cutting out their sinus really brought me along to the fact that she was doing surgery on folks and had no idea whether they were under a knife for a second time in six months, cutting out their sinus, inflammation, why are people inflamed? Well, maybe because there's so many foreign... Inflammation is attacking a foreign substance in the body. We're chronically inflamed because we're putting foreign substances in our body. It's not that complicated, but that's not

what med schools teach doctors. There's 80% of doctors, 80% of med schools do not require one nutrition class to this day. So, really understanding that. But yeah, so it's been a big path for me. And I think, I'd say it went this way. I was despondent like two years ago. Like peeling back the onion, it's like, oh my gosh, like we are screwed. Like what's going on? And then I got more of this empowerment thing. I actually like learning just reading from Mark Hyman, listening to podcasts like yours. Just the act, I think of trying to understand and question the American

Academy of Pediatrics saying that the first thing we should feed kids is highly processed grains, which kids never used to eat. Just like even asking questions and listen to podcasts, reading books, talking to folks, it's just like, to me, it's been a path of happiness. I don't have all the answers. But it's almost like, it's kind of obvious to me that the United States, our public policy should inspire us to have more awe about what we're putting into our body. It's the most important thing we do as humans.

It's like we are totally disaggregated from farmers. We just have no idea how our food is made. It's just like we should actually encourage more curiosity and awe about our bodies and what we're putting in there. Instead, we do the exact opposite. So I think it's a personal thing. But then it does get to hopefully changing some policy.

I think the big problem in policy is that there's this cynicism of medicine. And my sister Casey talked about this. And I think everyone hopefully can kind of see this. But this is my take. Is that there's just this like kind of shoulder shrug from the medical system. It's like, yeah, people are going to eat their Big Macs. People are going to make bad decisions. 80% of American adults are obese or overweight.

It's like, yeah, Americans are lazy. It's this nihilism about like patients and like, think about what they're saying, right? Think about what the medical system is saying. They're saying that 80% of Americans who are overweight, they're saying that 50% of American adults who are pre-diabetic or diabetic, they're saying that people are systematically trying to kill themselves at a population scale. Life expectancy is declining for the most sustained period in American history since 1860. People are missing their child's wedding or playing with their grandkids. People are suffering so much more. I don't think that's happening on a system. Clearly something wrong

is happening. Something's happening with incentives. I think the problem is that obviously we subsidize the poison that's making this happen. We have grain subsidies. We have corn subsidies. We talked about SNAP food stamps, school lunch programs, which don't have a sugar limit. We're actually subsidizing and paying for this poisonous food that's really hurting us.

And medical spending kind of crazily, right, only kicks in at the end once you get sick, which is much more expensive. So my goal in life is to spur and be a part of this bottoms up change and people waking up and asking questions and making better decisions, as you said. And then hopefully that eventually gets to seeing food as medicine.

If you put a, you know, I was recently speaking to a friend who has Crohn's disease, and a leading doctor told them they got to get a pharmaceutical treatment injections every two weeks for the rest of their lives. And the friend asked the doctor, well, what about food? The doctor said, top gringes you could have. He said, well, food's not part of this. And that person then went on a journey reading Terry Walls and reading other folks who have talked about food

and autoimmune conditions. And they are in the best health of their lives, symptom free, and have really completely transformed their mental health and just general life by going on this path of foodist medicine. The doctors could talk about that. We could actually, they're paying out of pocket now,

but it would be so much cheaper and just better because it would reduce other comorbidities. If, imagine that person got a specialized plan and instead of all these lifetime injections which are incredibly expensive, food interventions. That would obviously be the best public policy and we could do that tomorrow. We could do that tomorrow and it would transform lives

and I believe most people suffering from autoimmune conditions would want to go on that plan. But that cuts off a lifetime patient because of course, if that doctor isn't talking to that patient about food, and they continue getting their injections but eating inflammatory food, they're guaranteed for many more comorbidities. They're guaranteed for diabetes treatment eventually,

which generates a trillion dollars for the health care system in the US. They're guaranteed for other dynamics throughout their life. Chronic diseases are an absolute windfall for the medical system because they're lifetime patients to manage. And what you just said is all we're doing

is masking the symptoms. We're just putting a band-aid over it. Instead of teaching them how to fix their diet, this is what I have a huge problem with is ozempic stuff happening right now. I mean, they're not, they know, they're going on 60 minutes and saying that obesity is totally genetic and has nothing to do with our food or environment.

And then just telling everyone to go on these injections. And the problem is the second they come off these injections, they're still going to be doing the same thing they've been doing, you know, eating the same foods and having the same lifestyle. And then they're just going to gain all the way back and probably more. And then probably have stacked on more diseases because they haven't changed

anything. The ozempic thing is, you know, you're gonna fire me up on that but I've been on this because no, I totally agree with what you just said and for listeners who are following this, it's this diabetes drug that now is being rolled out as this miracle cure for obesity. So I think there's two issues here. Does the drug work? And then the societal implications.

So just the drug itself, and there's a lot of articles about this being the miracle cure. I just want to say, I predict that this is going to get recalled. I think it's going to be a really problematic drug. There's actually very credible reports, Peter and Tia, but other clinical studies have been showing, it actually dramatically reduces muscle mass.

It's very interesting, right? And you've got to understand. Everything we try to have a miracle cure for, you've got to, to me, this is so simple. It's like metabolic dysfunction is the root. Our cells are malfunction. OK, so it reduces muscle mass. What does that mean? This is so simple. It's like metabolic dysfunction is the root. Our cells are malfunctioned. Okay. So it reduces muscle mass.

What does that mean? Muscles are the glucose sponges. But if you have pre-diabetes or diabetes or are really trying to improve your blood sugar, the first thing... Food is obviously important, but one of the first things a doctor will say is do some resistance training because your muscles can really sponge up the glucose. Actually absent of insulin. But you can go down a whole other hole in that. But muscles can really sponge up the glucose. Actually absent of insulin. You can go down the whole route and hold that.

But muscles are really important. It erodes your muscle mass, not your fat. The studies are increasingly showing that. So inevitably, if that is true, and there's very credible reports that that is true, you are going to see an explosion, an increase of metabolic dysfunction, pre-diabetes, heart disease. So you might lose a little bit of weight. Your muscles are shriveling. And you have the doctors giving this,

because in order for them to substantiate wide prescriptions, we have to categorize obesity as a disease. And as you said, you have Dr. Fatima Stanford at Harvard on 60 Minutes, literally saying that food and lifestyle don't have much to do with diabetes, just take the drug. So let's think about that. We have somebody that doesn't know how to eat well, they start with the incentives, take this drug, lose a little bit of weight,

their muscles are shriveling, their continuing inflammatory food, maybe 20% less, but that's still your foundational fuel for your body is inflammatory high glucose poison. And you don't have the muscles to soak up the glucose. It's a recipe for disaster. Additionally, the drug is metabolic dysfunction. It's metabolic dysfunction. Technically, that's what the drug does, and particularly gastrointestinal dysfunction.

Actually, in an unknown way, we don't even know the full mechanisms, alters your gut to make you less hungry. There's also cases of depression and that's listed as a side effect. Why is that? Well, and it's again the medical system silos diseases and silos departments into 42 specialties, 82 subspecialties. But let's think about this. Our gut is what produces our serotonin. Our serotonin regulates our happiness. And

95% of your serotonin is made in your gut. If you have IBS or some gastrointestinal issues, you're much more likely to have depression. I recently had a little bit of a stomach bug. I realized that now I was actually like very irritable. Like I really felt actually much worse. And you usually wouldn't even associate that. But it's like your gut actually controls your mood in a huge way. So you're also seeing cases of that. So anyway, there's all of these that's just the drug itself. My big concern with those Zempig is that in the past 50 years, we've shifted our diet and it's causing everything. All the things are going up.

Autoimmune conditions to every chronic disease. We can think of depression to everything. It's all going up. It's really tied to food and metabolic habits. And what's happening is there's a huge push for government subsidization of this drug. And the target market is 80% of American adults and 45% of teens who are obese or overweight,

which is what the market is. So you're actually going to have, because we can't even negotiate drug prices, so you're going to have a very expensive drug. And then once you have that, the government cannot intercede between a doctor and the patient. So you obviously have an incentive for every doctor to be prescribing this drug, because as you said,

it's a lifetime treatment. You're supposed to be on it for life and manage the condition for life, which is great for the system, but terrible for the patient because it's a little cure when they're still eating inflammatory food and not solving the root cause issue. So my big thing on Ozempic, and I really do actually think it's one of the key debates of our time

right now, because this will be the most expensive drug for taxpayers in American history. We're on the road to bankruptcy from health care costs. We could take one fifth of what we're expected to spend on our Zimpook of taxpayer money and buy every obese child in this country healthy food. The question is, are we going the road of drugs, or are we going the road of food?

We need to slant health care dollars more towards food. If you tomorrow, when you had an autoimmune case, when you have obesity, obviously, when you have heart case, when you have obesity, obviously, when you have heart disease, when you have diabetes, shift more funding and more focus to food, we would revolutionize our human capital in this country. We would bend the cost of healthcare. I think we're being blinded from that with this ozendic debate. Yeah, we really are.

Thank you so much for breaking that down. I haven't heard anyone talk about it from that lens. And I mean, you make some really great points. And I wanted to add on to that as well, is that what's so maddening about this whole conversation is that they're trying to say that we're seeing this influx of diabetes and heart disease and obesity because it's genetically related. But you think about the fact that our genes haven't changed that much in the last 50 years and

We have people on this planet that have been alive long enough to see the change not only in our food landscape but also just in the rise of all these chronic diseases, so Why are we how are we not making this connection is what I want to know and I know why it's because it's not Incentivized to make that connection. It's so tragic. Yeah. I mean, I go back to the point, which I think is really unsettling. It's just like, you know, throughout the past couple of decades, Gallup does polls of like what institutions you trust. A lot of institutions have been going down, you know, the military stayed high, but you know, obviously Congress and, you obviously Congress and various corporations.

But medical has always been high. We've always trusted medical systems. Again, I just think it's taking the trust that the medical system rightfully gained at the first half of the century. The discovery of antibiotics is credited, in a large part, with winning World War II. There were a lot of great discoveries and just we've taken that trust the medical system taking that trust and Squandered it so I I just actually think like We've got to have a bottoms-up revolution I I think folks listen this podcast and others are getting empowered and taking matters in their own hands But I do feel for you know most

It's like an average person needs to defer, anyone needs to defer to institutions society, right? For some things. I'm focused and really have gratitude for focusing my life on trying to change healthcare. But like I defer to institutions of environmentalism and education for my children. It's just like you can't solve everything. And I think that's kind of what happened. It's like we've just been kind of tricked into this siloing of chronic disease. It makes no sense. Going back to Rockefeller, he had the industrial byproducts

and the seed oils. And then he was kind of the father of the modern pharmaceutical industry through kind of some of his oil byproducts too. And he funded, and actually one of his employees, last name Flexner, wrote the Flexner Report in the early 1900s, which actually established this idea of evidence-based medicine.

It actually established the credentialing and the rules in Congress. And Rockefeller wrote this bill about how medical education, and it stigmatized any type of nutrition. And it really propelled forward an innovationist-based system, propelled by this doctor, Dr. William Halstead at Johns Hopkins, who's the father of modern medical education, modern surgery.

And it was all about interventions. It was all about they stand, the medical system stands ready to intervene. And Dr. Halstead had all these radical surgeries, which turned out to be ineffective. But that's kind of been this macho kind of vibe of the medical system. It's like, well, we're not going to deal with nutrition.

We're going to step and cut someone open or write a prescription. And that flex door report in the 1909, I believe it was, is still, that bill hasn't been changed. And it's all about intervention based systems. I think that's been disastrous. I think that's been really disastrous and taking away all the human body and and created these profit incentives. Yeah. And didn't that report also create this kind of vilification of anyone that was talking

out about like holistic and nutrition interventions, right? And also too, like as I hear you saying this, I always come back to this. What is so crazy to me is that we've been, again, to bring that word back again, is brainwashed into thinking that having a surgery and like taking a pill is just totally normal. But if you, God forbid, you change your diet, that's considered to be this like insane intervention that we're being gaslight into thinking like, oh God, like, don't, you don't need to do that. To me, I'm like, and I'm not here to vilify surgeries.

Thank God we have doctors that can cut us open when we need to. But the fact that there are so many other interventions that we can do instead of having to cut someone open to heal their heart or whatever it is, that is asinine to me. The fact that we just immediately jump to like, oh, we'll just cut them open. That is the most extreme intervention you can possibly think of. It's barbaric when we have all these other options before that we can completely avoid that. And so it's just, yeah, I mean, I mean, this, this system needs to be

completely disrupted. We need an upheaval. Yeah, yeah. And my, my sister was a surgeon who talks about this. It's like, surgery is not, it's this rite of passage now. It's a rite of passage in America to get us some surgeries and take your statin and, you know, metformin and, you know, we talked about my mom who was, I said, passed away from pancreatic cancer, but she was like a normal American. She had elevated glucose levels, she got metformin, she had elevated cholesterol levels, she got a stat

and she had high blood pressure, she shook a truck. And every time it was like, oh, this is, everyone, go on your way. And it's like, these are warning signs. These are all warning signs. One reason I'm on this mission is that's where we need to get to. It's not this intervention basis. Oh, you're fine.

Take this out. It's like, let's be curious. Why is your cholesterol levels high? Why are your fasting levels? How can you reverse that? What happens even if you take a drug that maybe superficially brings one level down? What's actually happening in your body that if you don't reverse that underlying inflammation, underlying oxidative stress, underlying issues, what could that lead to?

How is that potentially tied to mental health problems like depression because there's cells in your brain and what elevated glucose and pre-diabetes represent is cellular dysfunction and a lot of cells are in your brain. It's like this curiosity about the interconnections. Doctors don't even know this. Doctors aren't taught this. Medical schools, a doctor chooses their specialty, as I mentioned, one out of 42 specialties.

So the way to rise up in medicine is go narrower and narrower. You go the head and neck where it's a couple of millimeters, and then you do a fellowship on one millimeter of the body. That's how you rise up and it's a complete siloing of the body to where an average patient who's going to the hospital is seeing several different doctors with several different treatment plans and several different medications. If somebody has some chronic inflammation and pre-diabetes and depression and fatty liver disease, it's all the same thing.

It's like we siloed this. You can fix that all doing one thing. Yeah, but it's totally wimpified and totally really stigmatized any talk of nutritional... Literally, I was speaking to leading doctors and a leading policy group and talking about these topics and they said, well, we'll connect you with our nutrition department. It's like this is a siloing of this issue. It's not nutrition or preventative health. This is not preventative. This is reversal. Like food and metabolic habits, it's siloed. It's kind of what... It's like, this is the best way to reverse diabetes, reverse heart disease.

You know, there's books you've probably seen, Dr. Bresnan, I believe it is, on reversing, you know, really clinically ways to reverse dementia. So yeah, I just... We've got it wrong. Yeah, and isn't it interesting that you'll never hear a doctor or anyone in the medical care system say that you can reverse diabetes, reverse dementia. Isn't it interesting that you'll never hear a doctor or anyone in the medical care system say that you can reverse diabetes, you can reverse all these different inflammatory, about like IBS and Crohn's and I mean you name it, you can reverse it. I've been saying this for 12 years and everyone's looking at me like I'm crazy, but it's because we've been told in the medical system that once you have this, oh, well, you just have to go on meds for life.

And it's because they're incentivized to put you on meds instead of actually just reverse it. But when we look at things like you've brought up these subsidies where our tax dollars are going, we are literally paying for these issues because we're subsidizing corn, wheat, soy, and then it's going into our food and then that's what's leading to the inflammation. And then, you know, we're complaining about our $4 trillion a year, you know, debt that we have with the healthcare system.

All of this, this entire conversation that we've had, all of these issues that we are dealing with that are top of mind, like, the biggest issues that we're dealing with this in the country that we're talking about from different angles on mainstream media could all be fixed if we just had this approach. You're just getting me fired up here.

I know I'm so fired up. No, like, oh my, I just want to underline you said it so well. Like, imagine you're just like, go high level and imagine you're trying to design the worst public policy imaginable for a government. You would subsidize food that's inflammatory and causes disease but that we know you would you would literally pay as we do right now over $10 billion for a government nutrition program for sugary drinks, which is this weaponized in many ways. The liquid form of sugar, which is unprecedented, nobody used to do that or drink that.

That immediately goes to the bloodstream. And then of course, it's subsidized in that soda, most likely high fructose corn syrup. Fructose is a processed, weaponized, processed fructose is totally weaponized. Because fructose used to be in fruit, it is in fruit, and actually evolutionarily there's some very interesting books on this, Drop Acid and Nature Wants Us to be Fat, Dr. Perlmutter wrote Drop Acid, going really deeply into the fact that fructose specifically shuts off our satiety signals. So it actually makes us want to like binge.

I think. Yeah. Yeah. So when you talk about weaponized, they know this. So the fructose, so anyway, we're giving kids, you know, not only just like overwhelming a hundred times more sugar than they ate a hundred years ago, but also like weaponized with natural flavors that are addictive and the fructose, which makes them want to drink more.

OK, so we pay for that. And then that causes trillions of dollars of downstream health impacts that are banked. Literally, and this isn't hyperbolic, and people gloss over the, we hire about 20% of health care. It's $4 trillion. I know you have that. It's real.

It is 20% of GDP. It's growing at an increasing rate. As I said, it's the largest and fastest growing industry in the United States, producing worse outcomes the more it grows and not slowing down. This is not a joke. And it's all because we're actually funding that at the front end, the devastation, particularly for lower income folks, but really everyone. From my mom and many people we know. It's like criminal. It is criminal. And what a lot of people don't understand is we're just, we're not actually seeing the true cost of what food costs because of these food subsidies, right? So people are going to fast food restaurants or,

I'm trying to think of an example, like Coke Cola, whatever it is, like they're able, so the fast food restaurants are able to give you that cheeseburger at a cheaper cost because it's made from all of these crops that are subsidized. If we were subsidizing avocado and greens and all these vegetables, those would be cheaper to buy.

But the reason why, and everyone's complaining that an avocado is more expensive than going through the McDonald's drive-through for a burger, it's because we are incentivizing those crops to be cheaper. Yeah, it's by design. Coca-Cola at a grocery store is less expensive than water. That's so crazy.

And that makes sense because there's so many ingredients of that Coca-Cola that are subsidized. So basically, the government's paying. And then of course, that's included in SAP, as I said. This is a huge... So this, as I said, I think it's like bottoms up revolution. My friend who has the autoimmune condition is paying out of pocket for more expensive food and that's tough.

But I do think... And I'll just be blunt and talking about this with my sister too, and maybe I'll just say it this way, this is my formulation. We can't have an excuse. If you can't, it's serious. The way I'm thinking about it is feeding my new child the healthiest food and myself is the highest priority. We will move to a smaller house if we can't afford it.

It's like on exercise. I would say that the food is number one, but exercise, and I've really been trying to do that more. I was recently talking to a friend. It is so important for me to exercise. I don't want my kid to see any screen time, but if I have an exercise, I'll put them in front of the screen It's like it's like do whatever you have to do for you and your kids to get these basic metabolic habits

And I think you know there are a lot of American suffering. There are a lot of problems I think it is Medically there's quite frankly should be a little bit more on the other side to saying this needs to get done like there's no excuses You need to cut other expenses in order to eat correctly. That's where we are right now. It is direly serious. We're all, in many ways, I think, not to be too hyperbolic, but I think losing our minds as a country in many ways,

I think really there's serious, both mental health and physical health problems that are unprecedented and tied to food. So I just think the medical system isn't like clear on that. It's just like drop what you're doing and make sure you're eating correctly. And, you know, just do whatever you need to do. Really, it should really be the message at this point,

given the fact that government's doing nothing. That's number one. Number two, I've been, this is what I'm devoting my life to. And I asked that simple question, how do we change the incentives? Because if we change the incentives, we're actually pricing the externalities correctly. Right now, vegetables and fruits are considered specialty crops by the USDA and receive 0.4% of all subsidies.

Greens and corn and soy are 80%. So it's totally rigged. So it's like, how do you change that? And one thing we're doing, our company, TruMed, is you can actually get a note from a doctor. Most doctors won't even know how to write this note. But forward thinking doctors, functional medicine doctors, actually are writing basically a letter of medical necessity for food and exercise.

And actually, food and exercise does count as a medical expense if a doctor substantiates it. And it can be for preventative or reversal. And almost everyone in America should be on a prevention, urgent prevention plan for various metabolic disorders. So we have a telehealth way, TruMed, to issue those notes

and enable folks to buy exercise, healthy food, select supplements, and improve metabolic health with HSA, FSA, tax-free dollars. That's kind of... It is a real problem on the incentives. And this is one way we're attacking that. There's a lot of ways we need to attack it. But a family can... $7,200, HSA, FSA, and that's tax-free, pre-income tax. So it's the best way we could find, I think, an impactful way to change that cost curve by enabling maybe 30%, 40%, depending on your tax rate, savings on food. It's so amazing what you're doing.

We'll definitely put a link in the show notes for that. And so thank you for sharing with everyone because I think this is so incredibly important. link in the show notes for that. And so thank you for sharing with everyone because I think this is so incredibly important. And I want to be mindful of your time, but I do want to end this on a more positive note and send everyone off feeling super inspired. So on a personal level, what would be your advice to people that are listening to this and they're fired up. What can people do on a personal level to shift this? I'm sure many, many folks listening are more along the journey as I am. I think it's just awe for food and what's going on in our body.

And I have a simple framework. I don't want a seed oil, added sugar, or highly processed grains to touch my one-year-old's lips for as long as I can have that happen, particularly as a child, an infant where we can control that, and really trying to get that out of the house. That's my simple friend. You're much more knowledgeable on this stuff. You might have some additions.

I think there are a lot of additions to that list when you get to natural flavors and dyes and stuff. But I think if you cut those three ingredients, you know, it gets to a situation where we would have a revolutionized country, if we had a national effort to not only, I'm not saying ban them, but even to your point, price and the externalities, the devastation of those are causing and it kind of, you know, rework the system. So I'm really, really working on that. And my framework and just like the journey I'm on is just curiosity. It's just like understanding that as I'm working out, it's like building muscle to absorb glucose

and just like, just diving into the science. I think it's criminal that biology is so boring in high school, at least for me. It's so interesting just learning. We've just been so disconnected. Listen to your podcast and others and just how sunlight impacts us. And we've villainized sun.

But my framework is it's food and kind of the framework I just talked about. It's movement, it's gotta be 150 minutes a week in some way. Then you got to basically just start doing that and not stop and still work in progress on that. But that's something I really try to do. Sleep, obviously, super important. And then I think there are... You talk about trusting companies. I think there's not a lot of trust to serve with our personal products or home. And I do think that's a more and more important thing and just like environmental toxins and going on a journey in that. I don't think

we're ever going to get to the right solution. But it's been such an improvement to my life to be on that journey. I had never been a big health not going to farmers markets. But now I just I think it's the most important issue in the world. I'm working to solve those incidents with the TrueMed. But just like, I don't know, my hope is just that the more and more people can be spurred to just be asking questions like that for them and their families. I'd also just say real quick, there's a lot to be happy for. I think the fact that these podcasts are gaining traction, you look at the bestseller list, it's people talking about metabolic health. It's not as if we don't have a system that's designed for criticism. And I actually think that's a real benefit of our system. I mean, we have come a long way. You know, we couldn't have imagined

where we would be a hundred years from now, but we have lost our way. We've lost our way big time, but the fact that we're able to talk about and the fact that so many folks are listening and on their personal journeys gives me hope. Yeah, oh my gosh. And I'm so glad that you said that.

And I want to also provide a little bit of that hope to people. There's a lot of people and a lot of companies doing it the right way. I went to a conference last spring with Force of Nature on their Rome Ranch outside of Austin, and it was an entire conference all about regenerative farming. And I left feeling so inspired and so hopeful for the future because there are so many people dialed in on this issue right now from farmers to parents to leaders in I mean there were there were people

there that work at General Mills and they were I was sitting at a table with them and they were talking to me about regenerative farming and how they want to change things and so there's a lot of people that are on this right now and a lot of people are waking up to this. And I would say as the listener, no matter where you are in your journey of all of this, like you said, stay curious and get healthy, get your family healthy, get your friends healthy because that's how we change this. We start putting our money into different companies because we have the buying power. And like you said, organic is becoming more of a thing because people are waking up and people are putting their money into these companies that are actually

doing it right. So there's a lot of amazing things happening. So there's a lot of hope to be had and I'm so grateful for your work because you're a huge part of this. And oh, actually, I have a question to ask you before we end, which you may already know it's coming, but what are your own personal health non-negotiable? So these are things that no matter how busy and crazy your day is, you do these to prioritize your own health. Great question.

And this has been a journey for me and really a work and to be perfectly candid, right? I'm doing the company writing a book and have a newborn. But here's what I'm putting for me and my son. I think it's just discipline and habits. I think we've been taken away evolutionarily from things that we just used to do as a part of natural life. Eat natural food, move all the time. To me, exercise is actually a part of... Like a key to everything in a way that instills discipline and a little bit of time almost meditatively to like understand

the connection to my body. Now if I can't do the hour class, I'm gonna do some push-ups. I'm gonna like get in some way in touch with my body and I think that the science on like moving your body and like what that does for yourselves is just so powerful. So I'm really on a non-negotiable thing where with our new child and talking about this with my wife, we're going to have an active lifestyle where we're going to be active consistently and not give up. And in a way, I do think the more I do that, it cements in my head an appreciation for my body, which I think psychologically actually spills the other habits.

The most important being food. The other thing I just, as I said, there's a lot of dietary philosophies. A lot of them have some validity, but I really just don't want to have seed oils, sugar, and processed grains in the house. Those are not necessary. Those are franken food ingredients. And I think that gets a long, long way on sleep as well. It's not quite a non-negotiable yet to just be totally candid. But that's the trifecta

for me. It's sleep, it's food, and it's exercise. I can really try to have curiosity about those habits and try to make them non-negotiable. I just think a lot of other things in your life flow. And I just think from lot of other things in your life flow. And I just think from a personal standpoint, and I hope, and I'm pushing for this, a public policy standpoint, not forcing people to sleep, but encouraging it. Like these are foundations,

and we'd have such a happier, more productive country if we did those things. So that's how I think about it. Yeah, I love that. It was so beautifully put. And you mentioned this a couple times, and I'm sorry that we didn't get more into it in the podcast, but it's really important to note the connection with what you eat

and your mental health. I mean, this is a huge thing. It is so big, and we are seeing so many people struggling in this country with their mental health, and there is a direct connection. And I've talked a lot about this on other podcasts, but we know that there's a direct connection between the gut and the brain through the vagus nerve and we know our guts are inflamed so with that connection we absolutely know our brains are inflamed as well and that's going to affect our hormones and the way we react to things, it's going

to lead to depression, anxiety. No wonder we're struggling on so many different fronts. So I just wanted to say that I appreciate, yeah, it's really powerful and I appreciate that that's part of your message too, because that is also an added benefit for our country is that when we start cleaning up our diet and our health, it's going to help us be happier as a nation too and be more productive. It's all connected. Yes. Well, please tell my listeners where they can find you and thank you so much. This was so amazing. Well, thank you, Courtney. Your work is super inspiring. It's just awesome to chat with

you. So yeah, my company, as I mentioned, is TruMed. And we're really trying to build up an army. I mean, we really want to, to me, it's a subversive act to use those HSA, FSA dollars that are kind of designed to go to pharma. Use them to keep yourself healthy on food and exercise. We're trying to make that very seamless. So trumead.com is the company. And then CaliMeans on Twitter. I've never been a huge fan of Twitter,

but it has been a great way to talk about these issues. I'm glad you have looked at some of the tweets. And just trying to keep it positive, keep it focused on this issue, and just share interesting things. And again, it's not about negativity, it's about being empowered and understanding how the systems work.

And yeah, the mental health connection too. And you mentioned regenerative farming at the end, but geez, that is a huge part of the answer that I've been diving into. So maybe next time we could talk about a couple of these other issues, but that's for another day. Yeah, well, thank you so much. And please let me know how I can be involved at TruMed.

I am so fired up after this conversation. So thank you for coming on. Thank you, Courtney. Thank you so much for listening to the Real Foodology podcast. This is a Wellness Loud production produced by Drake Peterson and mixed by Mike Fry. Theme song is by Georgie. You can watch the full video version of this podcast

inside the Spotify app or on YouTube. As always, you can leave us a voicemail by clicking the link in our bio. And if you liked this episode, please rate and review on your podcast app. For more shows by my team, go to wellnessloud.com. See you next time. The content of this show is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for individual medical and mental health advice and doesn't constitute a provider-patient relationship.

I am a nutritionist, but I am not your nutritionist. As always, talk to your doctor or your health team first.