Realfoodology - The Corporations Corrupting our Health | Calley & Casey Means Pt. I

Episode Date: April 30, 2024

EP. 196: Today we have part one of an eye-opening two-part series as I sit down with Calley and Casey Means to talk about the dark underbelly of the healthcare industry and its devastating impact on our metabolic health. Calley, an industry insider with political experience, exposes the corruption within the food industry, while his sister Casey, a disillusioned doctor turned co-founder of Levels, reveals the systemic flaws driving her away from medicine. Together, they uncover how healthcare, the fastest-growing industry, paradoxically leaves Americans sicker than ever, with 9 out of 10 leading causes of death linked to food. From the manipulation of media and politics to the insidious influence of big food, they dissect the intricate web of interests perpetuating our nation's health crisis. Tune in for an insightful discussion on metabolic dysfunction, policy roadblocks, and the urgent need for change. Check Out Their New Book Here! Topics Discussed 8:21 - The unsustainability of the current healthcare industry  12:55  - Corrupting influence of Big Food  16:38 - The silence of medical leaders & the impacts of cancel culture  21:08 - The troubling metabolic health statistics 28:53 - The biggest issues in our political and healthcare system 33:44 - Stagnant life expectancy & when to trust your doctor   40:16 - We’re poisoning our kids  42:51 - The overcomplication of nutritional science  47:01 - Big Pharma lobbying Check Out Calley Means  https://www.truemed.com/ Instagram New Book Check Out Casey Means  https://www.levelshealth.com/ Instagram New Book Sponsored By: Organifi www.organifi.com/realfoodology Code REALFOODOLOGY gets you 20% Off LMNT Get 8 FREE packs with any order at drinkLMNT.com/realfoodology Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Get a free $39 bottle at Getfresh324.com and only pay $1 shipping Our Place Use code REALFOODOLOGY for 10% off at fromourplace.com  Timeline Go to timelinenutrition.com/REALFOODOLOGY and use code REALFOODOLOGY for 10% off Check Out Courtney: LEAVE US A VOICE MESSAGE Check Out My new FREE Grocery Guide! @realfoodology www.realfoodology.com My Immune Supplement by 2x4 Produced By: Drake Peterson Edited By: Mike Frey

On today's episode of The Real Foodology Podcast. Isn't it incredible that the more nutrition studies we do, the sicker and fatter we're getting? The more exercise studies we do, the less we're exercising and the sicker and fatter we're getting. The more we spend on healthcare, the sicker and fatter we're getting. This is the point.

This is the point. It's a business. Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of The Real Foodology Podcast. I'm your host, Courtney Swan, and I am freaking pumped about today's episode. I sat down with Callie and Casey Means. You probably know both of their names for different reasons. Callie Means has been really making headlines lately. I'm so freaking proud of him, and I'm so honored to have been able to sit down with him

twice now. You may recognize him from my podcast, or you might have seen him recently on Tucker Carlson. He was also on Russell Brand. And he is really speaking out about the corruption that's happening in our food industry right now. And he's doing a great job at it. And then his sister, Casey Means, is a doctor who left the profession because she was seeing all the corruption that was happening in our medical system and our healthcare system right now. And she co-founded Levels, which is a company that's doing amazing things right now for metabolic health. I use Levels all the time. It's a CGM, continuous glucose monitor, that helps you to monitor your blood glucose levels in real time.

And they are just a power brother and sister duo right now. They are in a very unique position. And I said this a couple of times in the podcast where they actually got to see under the hood of what's really going on right now. And they're able to see both sides now because, you know, Callie used to work for these big food corporations and he's more on the political side. And then Casey, his sister, was in the medical field working as a surgeon and they really got to see firsthand what is happening right now and the corruption that's going on in our country. So we talk about all this. We talk about how healthcare is the largest and fastest growing industry and yet Americans are sicker than ever.

Nine out of the 10 leading causes of US deaths are tied to food. We talk about why we're ignoring this. We're talking about all the policies in play right now that are keeping us sick. What is metabolic dysfunction and how are all these chronic diseases connected to metabolic dysfunction?

How has the media, the government, big food, corporate capture, all of this perpetuating these issues that we're seeing right now, and so much more. We also talk a little bit about Ozempic. And they also talk about solutions that they have, which are six policies that could be enacted tomorrow if our government and our senators and people in Congress really started to accept that this is an issue and push back. So it's not all doom and gloom, but unfortunately right now, a lot of our mission and what we need to do is become aware, become online and wake up to what's happening. Because the more aware that all of us are, the more awake that our population is, the more that we can start demanding for change.

And we can really start to fix this. So I really hope that you liked the episode. I am so excited to share this with you. This just lights a fire under my ass. This was a long episode, so we split this into two parts. This is part one, so tune in next week for part two. With that, let's get into the episode. Very excited for you guys to hear it. As always, if you could take a moment to rate and review the podcast, not only does it mean so much to me, it really helps the show a lot. So I appreciate your support. Thanks guys. I've been consuming collagen for about six years now. I like to put it in my morning drink, whether that's coffee or matcha. I usually prefer coffee, but lately I've actually been doing coffee and then having a matcha a little bit later. I love to mix the

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for this and just getting so excited because what both of you talk about is what I'm so passionate about. And I really truly believe it's the biggest issue that we're facing right now for our population and for society. So first of all, thank you so much for coming on. Pumped to be here. Thank you for having us, Courtney. Okay. Let's just like unravel all of this and really get to the meat of it today. So healthcare is the largest and fastest growing industry, and yet Americans are sicker than ever. Nine out of 10 of the leading causes of death in the US are tied to food. How are we ignoring this? What's happening right now? You know, it's so interesting. You really call it out. We're spending $4 trillion on healthcare

costs. It is 21% of the GDP of the largest and wealthiest nation in the world. And despite increased spending that is outpacing inflation, we are getting sicker, fatter, more depressed, and more infertile every year as a population. It is the definition of unsustainable. And I think what people have to realize, and you just touched on it, is that healthcare is not only the largest industry in America, it is the fastest growing industry in the United States. There are tens of millions of Americans employed in this industry. And what every individual needs to realize is that healthcare is a business and it's a business that's designed to grow. And the way that healthcare grows in the current financial incentive model is having more patients in the system for a longer period of time,

having more things done to them. That is how healthcare grows. And we need to realize all of us individually, and this is not to scare people, but every institution that touches your health from hospitals to pharmaceutical companies, even to insurance companies, make more money when you are sick, and they make less money when you are well. And so I think it really comes down to following the money, unfortunately.

And when you follow the money with the current incentive structure, unfortunately, there's very little political or financial motivation to create a system in which we truly generate foundational health. Because unfortunately, generating foundational health means that you've essentially lost a customer from the system. And I think, you know, Callie and I both know many doctors and every single person I know in healthcare is a good person who went into healthcare to help patients. But unfortunately, there are $4 trillion of interest that create an invisible hand that guides every element of our medical education, our news cycles, every aspect of culture, which really gets us focused on reactive, intervention-based healthcare. And so that's where we're at right now. And yeah, Casey and I had an interesting journey to put the puzzle pieces together.

So we were both born in Washington, D.C. Kind of a success for our family was rising up the traditional system. So we both went to Stanford. I studied economics, politics. She studied medicine. I went into politics and then worked for food and pharma companies. I was a consultant for them. And then Casey, we were so proud of her, right? It was rising up the ladder. Stanford Med School and surgical residency. I was just like so proud that

she was like getting all those stamps. And then I saw food and pharma companies, but I call this devil's bargain. I was working for food companies in the morning and they're trying to get more processed food to lower income kids. And then pharma companies fundamentally profiting from people being sick because of food and not talking out about nutrition. See what Casey's dealing with with the sick care system upfront.

So we both through this journey, kind of putting the pieces together to each other, it comes to this simple thesis, right? This simple thesis that the biggest institution in the country is incentivized for us to be sick. And it's also the healthcare industry standing by and that it's really silent and almost complicit in the fact that we're metabolic and healthy, which is tied to food. So we've really decided to devote our lives to unpacking that incentive. From a policy perspective, what I'm

passionate about is this is not about changing marginal healthcare policies. We have to attack the fact that 95% of the 4.6 trillion we spend on healthcare is managing disease once we're sick. What would the world look like if we asked how to spend that money to incentivize metabolic healthy habits? Like we have to get there. The American people want to be healthy, but the deck is slanted against them right now. Yeah. And what's really crazy to me is that we're, so we're obviously, we're only getting sicker right now, but there's no real talk about this in politics. There's no talk about this in the mainstream narrative.

Like, I don't think people really understand how sick we are right now as a population. I think people are slowly starting to wake up because they know, you know, they have a family member that is, or, you know, but at the same time, like, we're not even allowed to really talk about obesity in the public.

Every time I talk about it online, I get fully attacked. And I'm like, I'm not fat shaming. I'm just trying to point out the obvious right now of what's happening. And I think that's what you two both really talk about so poignantly is what's happening from in a media and political standpoint

where we're not even allowed to have these conversations. We're also not having these conversations on a large scale level right now. Yeah, I think what's very interesting is, okay, we know the system's kind of rigged. We know the system's stacked against us right now. But what I saw is really like deep financial incentives. So you know, back when I was working for the food and pharma companies, we would pay people that the American people trust. We would pay influencers, we would pay civil rights groups, we would pay medical groups, we would pay nutritionist groups, right? The lead nutritionist association is their biggest funder is food companies.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, they accept money from Coca-Cola. The American Diabetes Association of all organizations accepts money from Coca-Cola. Civil rights groups like the NAACP. Now today, a massive bombshell report in the Washington Post very recently came out that the nutritionists attacking you are actually secretly paid for by food companies. So it's not actually that complicated. It's who do people trust and how do we toxify the debate? How do we insert fat phobia? How do we insert racism? How do we insert sexism? When you step back, it's this Orwellian situation where it's not good to be obese.

And the arguments of the left and right are kind of co-opted to shame us to not call that out. The key point I have is it's not about shaming the American people. I'm a big personal responsibility guy. I was raised libertarian. I consider myself pretty conservative. When 80% of American adults are overweight or obese, and crucially, when children are obese at epidemic levels, that's not about the children being lazy. There's something happening.

I don't think 80% of American adults, let's call obesity what it is. It's a visual result of metabolic dysfunction. It's not optimal. You're most likely gonna live a more depressed, shorter, more tortured life with many more comorbidities. It's a national emergency. And the fact that these groups that, frankly,

I helped pay early in my career are refereeing is absolute scandal. What I would say, I would just maybe push on one thing you said. I think the American people are really waking up. I think the BS is being called out. I think we're in a monumental year in 2024. Whatever you think of the candidates, of Trump and RFK, quite frankly, if you have a three-way race, they're getting over 70% of the vote. And again, taking politics aside, the candidates that are getting

the majority of US support right now are fundamentally based in their campaign of the breakdown of institutions. RFK, who's the most popular candidate among women in independence, I would say his entire candidacy is based on distrust of the medical system. So I think you hit on it.

I don't think polling gets this right, but if you really go to an average American and ask what they are truly concerned about, what's truly driving the anxiety, it's that they walk into their children's school and there's clearly something bad happening in physical and mental health. And you look at US life expectancy, it's on a decline,

chronic diseases are all up. This is the key driver of anxiety for the American people based on our rigged system. And I think that's what we're really trying to push is it's not your fault, it's a patient's, it's the system's fault. And I actually think we wanna radicalize and frankly see distrust

when it comes to chronic disease prevention. And we can unpack that. And that's the first step to empowerment. You as an individual can have more control over your health than you're led to believe. And I would just add, you know, something that, you know, Callie and I think a lot about is like, why are our medical leaders truly standing silent in the face of these alarming statistics? You mentioned that many people don't really know how bad the health of the country is right now,

but 50% of American adults now have prediabetes or type 2 diabetes, almost completely preventable, both prediabetes and type 2 diabetes being a diagnosis that represents overt dysfunction in how our cells fundamentally power themselves. I mean, this is, you know, we kind of gloss over the statistics because it's like, oh, diabetes, it sounds so clinical. But when half of this country have a fundamental problem in their cells, in how we convert food energy to human cellular energy,

and we are underpowered humans, this is bigger than diabetes. This is about a dimming of our life force as a species. I mean, we are literally cooling as a species because our mitochondria, these organelles inside our cells that actually do our metabolic processes are not working properly in every aspect of our culture is sort of stacked against them. And you would think in the face of this, that every doctor in the country and every medical leader in the CDC and the NIH would just be speaking crystal clear, people, we've got to stop eating refined grains and sugars. We've got to get rid of the ultra-processed foods. We know these things are causing the problems. We got to get them out of our schools. Instead, the U.S.

government is brokering deals with Kraft Heinz to put Lunchables in schools, federally subsidized. This is outrageous. And a lot of people like to say, oh, well, people don't want to eat healthy. People don't want to do this. And I think what is really a point that we want to get across is that people do listen to doctors. They told us to get the shot. People got the shot. They told us to stop smoking, smoking plummeted. When the food pyramid came out and they said, eat six to 11 servings of cereal grains and grain products, whole grains, people ate more carbs. People do actually listen when there is a clear, strong messaging from our leaders. And I think it is absolutely, it's truly deplorable. And I think it's a sign of really

widespread cowardice that our medical leaders aren't using every platform they could possibly get on to speak, just speak absolutely plainly about what Americans need to do. Get rid of the processed food, get rid of the refined carbs and sugar, exercise, move every single day. You got to get good sleep. You got to get the environmental toxins out of your products. You know, you've got to be outdoors more than 6% of your day, which is what the average American is spending outdoors. Why is this not everywhere? And I think part of it loops back to our cancel culture. The industries have weaponized the rise of social media to silence people and to silence conversation, and everyone is afraid.

And there is, I think there's a real spiritual crisis going on in America because what I see, especially in the medical community, is that people are afraid to speak authentically because they're afraid of the repercussions. And I think that what I just really, really hope for the world is that we get back to realizing that life is short. We are here for a brief moment. And if we are not speaking from our heart, speaking plainly, having moral

leadership, saying what's true inside of us, we are like a stagnant sort of sad version of ourselves. And I think interestingly, this sort of fear in speaking, this block in the flow of our authenticity that we're seeing on a mass scale in our culture, it mirrors what's happening with metabolic dysfunction. Metabolic dysfunction is literally the blocking of energy flow in the body through the mitochondria, through mitochondrial dysfunction.

So I think we're just seeing this big, sad stagnation of human potential that's mirrored in culture, it's mirrored in our cells. And if we wanna unlock the full human potential of our country, we have to start by unlocking the potential of the cells, which means orienting the $4 trillion arrow of American healthcare right at the mitochondria.

Wow, that was so well said. That was so well said. That was so well said. I also want to say that, so there was a couple statistics because you dropped one statistic about 50% of Americans being at least pre-diabetic at this point. There was a couple of other stats that really shocked me. One was 80% of 21 year olds are ineligible for the military. This is a national security threat at this point. And another one, I think I heard this on a recent podcast you were on, Callie, which was 72%. So there were 72% more evacuations out of Iraq and Afghanistan for obesity-related problems than war injuries.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is why I think, you know, just really in case he's, I think the best message to the country on this is that obviously metabolic health needs to be the framework of how we view health. I have never been a health guy. I, as I said, grew up really caring about US policy, US competitiveness, but it is so obvious that metabolic health has to be the central public policy goal because our human capital is being denigrated. And let me just unpack what metabolic health means to me.

Metabolic health, the key principle is that it's simple and there's a couple numerous legs to the stool, but a finite number. It's obviously food. When we're feeding the American people ultra-processed poison, when that's gone from 0% of our diet to close to 70% for kids in 100 years, we have thousands of chemicals that we don't even know about that are banned in other countries.

When we have glyphosate-laden grains that we're recommending from the American Academy of Pediatrics to be the first food for our kids, right? When we have liquid sugar, which is really a new invention, which is a weapon of mass destruction for blood sugar. When these things are not only tolerated but recommended by the government for our kids, we obviously have an assault going on the food front. Sleep, we're getting two hours less sleep than we did a hundred years ago.

There's actually been an assault on our circadian rhythm and sleep, which is extremely important. There's been a lot you've been talking about and others on health podcasts I love about the importance of circadian rhythm, the importance of light, the importance of sleep. I mean, that's such a basic principle, but it's very important. Stress management, we have weapons of mass

destruction for chronic stress in our phones that we're giving every single kid. A child today is absolutely unparalleled what they're facing for a chronic stress, you know, and it's just hijacking their evolutionary, you know, their biology to keep them constantly in fear, constantly addicted, constantly stressed to sell products to kids, in my opinion. So there's that happening. So it's these basic metabolic patterns. The other one, of course, is movement and sedentary behavior.

We've never used to have gyms. We just had movement built into our daily lives, but through public policy and decisions, right? We have these schools that are basically factories really created by Rockefeller to literally turn children into, they're designed in a factory model, worker bees, they sit in a sunless room, sedentary. So you literally, as a matter of health policy, as a matter of public policy, you should just take each one of those verticals and just ask, how can we improve these inputs to our population that produce thriving?

You know, and Casey talks about the science much more eloquently. But like, obviously, when we have an assault on those things, that's where we need to start. And, you know, that's where our book's about. And again, I think we've really lost our way that medicine is so siled, that metabolic health still sounds like a French concept to the people in academia, that these things are almost French. It's the core to everything and needs to be how we guide public policy and guide medicine. Did you know that your olive oil might not be real? If you follow me on Instagram, you know that this is quite the topic of discussion right now on my Instagram.

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having looked under the hood and then also looking at what's happening right now when we're dropping all these statistics, what are the biggest issues in your eyes that are happening right now from a political and a medical standpoint? As far as like doctors being paid off, the funding is coming from these big food corporations. How is this messaging, like you just said, being co-opted right now? Yeah. I mean, I think I might just start with a story about this really like my awakening in healthcare, which was, I was in my fifth year of surgical residency and I was training as a head and neck surgeon, chief resident. And I was on my sinus surgery block. And I had a patient who I talk about in the book, whose name was Sophia. And she was in for her

third revision sinus surgery. And she had several other health conditions like so many Americans. She had high blood pressure. She had hypertension, high blood pressure. She had high cholesterol. She was overweight, had some depression, et cetera. So I'm there in the operating room, gloved up, staring down at this patient on the table. And I have my drill in my hand. I'm about ready to literally bust through her skull in her face to suck pus out of her sinus. And I look down at her, and it's so morbid surgery. Like it's so intense. And I'm looking down at this patient.

I'm like, I really have no idea why this patient is sick. I have no idea why she's here. Like I know how to prescribe steroids. I know how to prescribe antibiotics. I know how to drill through her face and suck pus out. But like, what is truly wrong inside her body? And, you know, I remember doing the surgery and being done and thinking like, this patient's going to be back. And like, she's also going to still have a shorter, sadder life because of all of her other conditions. And so I think this gets at really the core of what is the problem that you're asking about, which is that

the doctors are not trained to truly understand the root cause physiology that is leading to disease. We are trained as worker bees to diagnose based on symptom-based and biomarker-based criteria, to attach a diagnosis to that pattern, a constellation of symptoms and labs, and to prescribe an intervention or a drug and do it as quickly as possible. That is good medicine. That is respectable medicine in our system. But you ask a doctor to explain to you how depression, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, prediabetes, obesity, sinusitis relate to each other, you're going to get blank stares. And what I realized, and what I think a lot of doctors don't realize because we're so entrenched in this cult of guideline-based, evidence-based medicine is that at every level,

their education was influenced by so many organizations with a vested interest in those doctors intervening that the religion that we have subscribed to is fully based on essentially like incentives that they're not aware of. And so going back to Rockefeller and the Halstead model of disease management and the Flexner report and these core pieces of really subliminal influence of the healthcare system that we then spend 10 years rising the ranks of. And of course, you're going to be loath to question that after your $500,000 in debt, and you've got a mortgage payment. But that's what I'm really asking doctors to do is to really think deeply. You see doctors, they're dealing with a huge crisis of mental health. Suicide rates in doctors are some of the highest

of any field in the country. And burnout is in some specialties over 80%. And I think a real core root cause of this is not because just they're overworked. It's because on some level, they understand that they are trapped in a broken system and it feels too big to shift. But it shifts by us waking up and speaking plainly

about the issues in the system. And one of the biggest issues is that we do not understand the root causes that are connecting disease. And like you mentioned, nine of the 10 leading causes of death in the United States right now are fundamentally rooted in metabolic dysfunction. And so that's what we really need to all pursue deep education in as doctors.

And as Callie said, realize that it's actually quite simple to dig your way out of metabolic dysfunction. So, you know, that's a big piece of it. Yeah, and just adding on to that, something we talk about in the book that's been a helpful framework for me and hopefully for others, is when you talk about the biggest issue, I would frame it on how we're attacking chronic conditions.

I think there's this, as we're kind of impugning the healthcare system, a lot of people, and I used to be this way, it's like, well, haven't we produced miracles? Hasn't life expectancy extended double? You know, aren't we living in a great situation? And I think we have to say a couple of things. Yes, the medical system has produced miracles. Yes, I wouldn't trade probably living in this era versus others in a lot of ways, but we should unpack what those miracles were. And if you do,

I think if you think of a miracle like antibiotics or emergency surgical procedures for various things that were life-threatening, you know, go down the list. They're almost always something for an acute situation, something that was good, killed you right away. And these are usually innovations that were discovered before 1960. When we think of medical miracles,

it's almost always, again, for something that was gonna kill us right away. As Peter Thier pointed out in his book, if you actually control for infectious and chronic diseases, life expectancy hasn't risen in the past 100 years. It's almost all been driven by these, you know, sanitation and the antibiotics and these, you know, it was more deadly for a woman to give birth 100 years ago

than have breast cancer today. It was several percent of women died during childbirth. I mean, it was absolutely the most dangerous thing a anyone could do. It was solved for things like that. I think what the thing we need to unpack is the medical system post-World War II, you know, which was won by large measure from the invention of antibiotics and some medical innovations. They took the trust of science and said, you need to trust us on chronic conditions. And chronic conditions, which now make up 95% of medical spending, are one, a beautiful economic invention

because you don't cure the condition and the patient doesn't die. They actually maintain their sickness and get other comorbidities that you can treat in silos. It's a beautiful economic invention that the patient doesn't die, but stays sick. And it's been an absolute disaster. There's actually not a chronic disease treatment

I can identify that's been correlated with the lowering of the chronic diseases it's been to be trying to treat. You know, stens, more heart disease, metformin, more diabetes, SSRIs, which 25% of women in the United States are on more depression and suicide. So, you know, we'll probably get into Ozempic,

which is literally they're estimating that obesity is going to rise as more Ozempic is prescribed, which you'd have to explain to me that one. But that is consistent. That is consistent with every single chronic disease. So what I would say, just as a general framework,

and I think this parents, and I have a new child, it's like, when do we trust? Trust your doctor if your child has a life-threatening infection. Trust your child if there is a dire medical emergency. Absolutely, the medical system is a miracle. But if your doctor if your child has a life-threatening infection. Trust your child if there is a dire medical emergency. Absolutely, the medical system is a miracle.

But if your doctor is saying that your child has elevated cholesterol and needs to potentially go on a statin like many kids are on, if your doctor is talking about your child's mental health and trying to put them on an SSRI, which are popped out like candy at high schools, if your doctor is saying they have ADHD and need to go on a methamphetamine, Adderall, which are 15% of high schoolers are on, you really take a step back. Because what's happening there

is you're implicitly saying to your child that their chronic condition, which is a metabolic condition at its root, is a pill deficiency. And inevitably you're getting them on that treadmill where they're not learning metabolic healthy habits, which are vital for their lives and the success and thriving of their lives.

They're seeing that there's a cure. And let's be very clear, the American Diabetes Association until 2018 said that the cure for diabetes, that you don't actually have to monitor your diet. You don't even have to change your sugar intake. They were shamed to change this, but until 2018,

they didn't even have sugar reduction guidance for diabetics as long as they took their medication. You know, the obesity doctors are literally saying, obesity is genetic, not tied to what you eat. Just take the Ozempic. This is the message. It's very clear. Stans is a wonder drug.

Oh, the doctors say this. Talk to anyone with a stan. They tell the guy they're prescribing the stan. Oh, you can continue eating your burgers. That's the message of these drugs. So you just continue racking up the comorbidities and the criminal thing, what's happening. I think the biggest war in a way in the country right now

is that there's a battle to get kids on this treadmill because stardom younger, get on that chronic disease treadmill. So that's why I'd say acute versus chronic. I'm always looking for ways to improve my mitochondria because our mitochondria are life force. They are the battery of the cell after all. My boyfriend loves to frequently remind me that that's the only fact that he remembers from biology, but mitochondria actually are so

imperative to our overall health. When our mitochondria start to decline, everything else goes with it. That's when we really start to see signs of aging. So it's so incredibly important to support our mitochondria in any way that we possibly can, which is why I take Timeline Nutrition MitoPure to support my mitochondria. It contains an ingredient called urolithin A, and that alone significantly increases muscle strength and endurance with no other change in lifestyle, according to the clinical studies. Timeline Nutrition has loads of studies. They are a global leader in urolithin A research and their products are NSF certified

for sport. If you want to go back and listen to the podcast episode I did with the founder, we go over in depth all about the research and we talk about all the amazing benefits of MitoPure. For example, maintaining muscle health, which is incredibly important to longevity and enduring good health. It also has postbiotics, the active nutrients your body makes during digestion. They're an emerging driver of good health. And urolithin A is one of the first postbiotics shown to have major health benefits and it has become available to all of us in Timeline MitoPure. It also upgrades your body's cellular power grid, giving your body the energy it needs to optimize.

Also, this is purely anecdotal, but I do have a friend who works one-on-one with clients for nutrition and she had five or six different women take Timeline MitoPure and improve their egg quality and egg numbers when they were doing egg retrievals. So when I went and froze my eggs, I wish that I had known about this because I would have taken this before I froze my eggs. Again, that's just purely anecdotal. There's no studies to back it up, but it is something interesting. They come in soft gels. They also come in their protein powder, or they have just the simple powder that you can buy. I get the ginger powder and I put it in my drinks every morning. Timeline is offering 10% off your first order of Mito Pure. Go to timelinenutrition.com

slash realfoodology and use code realfoodology to get 10% off your order. That's T-I-M-E-L-I-N-E-N-U-T-R-I-T-I-O-N.com slash real foodology. I recommend trying their starter pack with all three formats. And I heard you say this very eloquently recently that it's, it's as if we have a dirty fish tank and instead of cleaning out the fish tank, we're just medicating the fish. Yeah. I was recently at a playground with my two-year-old and I got really emotional. I looked at like every single kid I could identify, you know, five years old, clearly was metabolic dysfunctional, clearly like had some weight issues. There's, you know, wrappers ofprocessed food and soda bottles all over the playground. The kids are eating them. So we have this dirty tank where literally through corruption are

poisoning our kids. It's just that simple. Our kids are ingesting poison. The USDA, where 19 of the 20 advisors who made the nutrition guidelines were paid for by processed food companies. You'll have to explain this one to me too, but the 2025 panel of the scientists announced on the panel that again, make the guidelines for our children. 40% of them are paid by Novo Nordics, the maker of Ozempic. Literally, they're paying off the people making our nutrition guidelines.

These are very corrupted people, literally creating guidelines saying that they've actually just said a diet, 91% in ultra processed food for kids that can be healthy. They say that two years and up that 10% of their diet can be added sugar, which is just crazy. We don't recommend a recommended range of cigarettes for kids or alcohol. I don't think sugar should be banned, but that's insane to recommend it. So we're actually, that's the tank. We're like by design poisoning kids. And it's just this like horrible sci-fi movie where we're doing that

to our population. And then saying, as the American Academy of Pediatrics is shouting at the top of our lungs for 12 years and up, it should be the urgent intervention. A first line intervention for an obese or overweight child is a lifetime shot. A lifetime shot of liquid bulimia that paralyzes your stomach. So like that isn't crazy. You would never design a system this way.

Obviously, if we're systematically poisoning kids, you should stop poisoning kids because these micro siloed drug solutions clearly don't work. And it's just not the answer to that underlying metabolic dysfunction that's caused by the poisoning. So there's a lot of efforts. There's a lot of money to prevent every institution of medicine from obscuring that fact from medical schools to insurance companies, to hospitals, to pharma companies. It's the largest industry in the country, and it's predicated on obscuring that fact.

Yeah. So were you going to say something else? Okay. Well, I was going to just mention a big point in the book, in Good Energy, that Callie and I make is that everyone's walking around feeling confused about nutrition and confused about healthcare. And there's been studies that show that 80% of consumers

feel that there's vastly conflicting information about nutrition and over 50% of them are just abjectly confused about what to eat. And that is not a function of the fact that it actually is confusing. It is the purpose of these studies is to make it confusing. Because if you are a confused consumer,

you're just gonna seek out scattershot solutions to your problem. And you're gonna buy this health bar and you're gonna buy this book and that. They want it to be confusing. Isn't it incredible that the more nutrition studies we do, the sicker and fatter we're getting? The more exercise studies we do, the less we're exercising and the sicker and fatter we're getting. The more we spend on healthcare, the sicker and fatter we're getting. This is the

point. This is the point. It's a business. And so a big message that Callie and I put forth in the book is that, you know, is that it's actually very simple. Health is fundamentally a matching problem. You have cells, you have 40 trillion cells, and those cells have a basic way of operating that we pretty well understand through our basic science research in our country. And we need to match the needs of those cells to the environmental inputs. And when the environmental inputs

match the needs of the cells, we have health. And when they don't, when you either do not meet the needs of the cell or you overburden it with things that are toxic, you have symptoms and you have disease. A symptom cannot arise out of thin air. A symptom is necessarily the result of cellular dysfunction. So for the kids who have the behavioral issues

and who have the sleep issues and the ADHD and the obesity and their blood sugar is rising, parents need to realize that is necessarily the result of cellular dysfunction and cellular dysfunction is the result of a cell's needs not being met or a cell being poisoned. So really what we just need to do is just back up and look at our environment and look at what our cells are being exposed to around us on every aspect of diet and lifestyle, which is food, sleep, exercise, stress management, what's happening to our microbiome,

the light we're being exposed to and the temperatures we're being exposed to and the environmental toxins. Look at those things, take stock and clean it all up. And when you do that and you match the evolutionary needs of our cells with our environmental inputs, which is real clean food, real clean water,

lack of synthetic toxins in our food, water, air, home, personal care products, not getting artificial light at night, getting real light during the daytime, being outdoors, moving our bodies. We have health. It's really very simple. And the quibbling about the minutia

of all the little health protocols and the health hacks and the endless studies and the cult of, you know, evidence-based medicine. It's actually part of the problem. We need to keep it simple. Yeah. Well, but the biggest issue that we're facing right now is, so people are confused, but then also the system is rigged against us right now. You know, like I was just thinking, Callie, as you were talking about these poor children that are essentially being poisoned. And I think about all the, so just this week, I've had three separate moms send me a screenshot

of their children's lunches at school. And I was horrified. It's burritos, Tostitos, Doritos. Like it's all this processed goldfish and its system is rigged against them right now. You brought up Lunchables. So Lunchables has a massive contract now with all these public schools across the United States. So it feels like there's this coordinated attack and the system has been rigged against us. So what, one, first of all, what's happening with all that?

Because you guys speak so eloquently to this and I really want people to understand really what's happening. And then what can we do as an individual? So just stepping back, one framework I have is just super simple, that pharma is the largest payer of money to media, to politicians, to research organizations, to medical groups, to tech companies, tech ads, you know, to control what's on what we see on the various social platforms. So literally, I mean, and I mean, like, like that, literally, like, they pay five times more in lobbying and political donations in the oil industry, three times more than any other industry. So they actually pay the bills.

The FDA itself, 75% of the bills are funded by pharma. It's not taxpayer money. It's literally pharmaceutical money. And of course, it's a revolving door between pharma executives and the FDA panels. So they're actually bankrolling the situation. So let me give you an anecdote about the Lunchables and how this gets into schools. Because I think it's really important to unpack

like exactly how this happens. So you might remember there was this NIH Tufts Nut nutrition study that said lucky charms are healthier than beef. And I think we all talked about that. It was kind of funny. It's actually very serious because it's so ridiculous that we laugh at it. But the purpose of those studies is to influence schools. Actually, on the press release for that particular study, it said the goal of this study is to influence childhood nutrition guidelines. So what you do is you have food companies spending 11 times more on foundational nutrition research than the NIH. As Casey said, there's been 50,000 nutrition studies in the past

two years. So there's this mound of nutrition studies that are not arguing usually for pasture-raised beef or broccoli consumption. They're arguing almost always for processed food and why processed food is okay to eat. That, you know, why would you need to study, have a study on natural, unpoisoned food? No, so you do these... They're also not making money on those things.

Yeah, so when you have these studies, so you do... So, okay, so they're funding the studies. Then they bring those studies to members of Congress. I've met with 50 members of Congress in the past year and they tell me time and time again, they're like, I'm a military guy. I'm not a health expert. I'm not a doctor. I'm on the health committee, but I have lobbies coming in day after day after day. And it's not always just abject corruption, but the lobbyists come into the office and slam the studies down and say, if you go against this for the nutrition guidelines, you're anti-science and we're going to attack you for being anti-science. So those studies from Tufts, from Harvard, from Stanford become science. And then they're used as a club to attack other decision makers

and opinion leaders and school boards and members of Congress and people who make just various dietary regulations. That's the club of science. Then you have the media. The media receives 60% of their funding from pharma. By far, they're the largest spender. So pharma is paying the bills. I think it's very interesting that you don't have examinations of this corruption on mainstream media. You didn't have examinations of why nobody that was metabolically healthy was dying of COVID and how COVID was basically a foodborne illness of metabolic dysfunction and really preyed on weak immune systems. No, no, you had the media in this country as actually referees for anyone even

questioning the pharmaceutical industrial process complex and frankly processed food. They're very different than the media is supposed to be or used processed food. They're very different than the media is supposed to be or used to be. They're enforcers of the status quo and try to ruin anyone who questions it. So that's what the media, it's very interesting, right? Where you have during COVID, you have the mainstream media absolutely bashing anyone over the head who says COVID isn't anything other than a pharmaceutical, you know, something that the pharmaceuticals can fully solve. And then you have all independent media

from Joe Rogan on down to you, to all the health podcasts, actually talking about metabolic health, actually talking about the need to eat healthy and exercise and how these could be potentially related to, you know, getting a COVID or getting other conditions. Those people were attacked. So the people actually literally saying to eat healthy and exercise, like there's,

there's leaked emails in the NH that are saying they were enemy number one of science misinformation. So, so that's how it all works. You're buying the research, you're using that research to influence the members of Congress and regulators who are also directly paid. And you're enforcing that message on the media who you're paying for. So you just, it's not actually that complicated. What I think we need to do in this country, I think is happening through the podcast and independent media revolution, through politicians, I think who are waking up, you know, through bio wearables and people taking control of their own health data through the bestselling books being about these concepts and moving to a new era of medicine.

You know, people are waking up, but it's got to be a bottoms-up revolution where we basically just stop accepting the bullshit. And then I think that could eventually force top-down change, which has to happen because we're not going to win if we have, you know, trillions of dollars of incentives against us. But that's how I'd explain it. Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode

of The Real Foodology Podcast. If you liked the episode, please leave a review in your podcast app to let me know. This is a Resonant Media production produced by Drake Peterson and edited by Mike Fry. The theme song is called Heaven by the amazing singer Georgie. Georgie is spelled with a J. For more amazing podcasts produced by my team, go to resonantmediagroup.com. I love you guys so much. See you next week.

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.