The Highwire with Del Bigtree - BIG BEVERAGE GOES TO WAR WITH MAHA

Episode Date: April 5, 2025

While nearly 30 states are moving toward banning dangerous dyes in food, the American Beverage Association is fighting back in the same playbook as big pharma lobbyists to bully government officials.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

Just a couple weeks ago, Kennedy sat down with the heads of the largest food makers. And this was in Politico, the headline that was, this is a closed-door meeting, by the way. Kennedy gives food companies CEOs an ultimatum. And the ultimatum was basically clean up your food where government's going to do it for you. And just a couple hours after that meeting, you saw this headline get posted. This is his movements through the FDA, and that would be Macri at that point. RFK Jr. seeks to eliminate FDA's grass has generally recognized a safe loophole to improve food ingredient safety. So right now, just a quick silent.

There's a process called self-affirmation. So if you're a big major food company, you can conduct your own safety evaluation without FDA, without notifying FDA. You can just do it. You don't have to tell them that you're doing this. And that assessment can be, there's no requirement in FDA that has to be reported that this assessment's happening. And this enters the food supply because it's generally recognized as safe.

So this is going to be the low-hanging fruit here that is most likely going to be close. They're going to take away the self-affirmation pathway. So they have to go through proper channels for proper science. Put that to the FDA. And the FDA may even have, I mean, one of the conversations that they may even have an independent body come in using the FDA to look at these things. So there's not this complex of interest with big food. So that's a positive thing. But at the state level, again, at state levels, no one's waiting for Kennedy or the FDA or anybody to do anything. The state levels are moving on their own. In West Virginia, They've become now the first state to have a sweeping ban on food dyes.

Seven artificial food dyes are out. This is gone now. So this is the first state in the nation to pass this, what's called a sweeping ban. Remember, there's been long link. These dyes have been long-length behavioral issues, endocrine disruption, cancer. And you can see here this, this not just West Virginia, it's not just California. We look at this map here. It's almost 30 other states that are proposing this now.

That's a movement right there. That's what's important, right? It's the people. That's what makes the difference there. As Mary Holland said, I mean, nobody in government's going to do this on their own. That's where we're going to do it by pressuring our local governments to do something about it. And then that just opens up and makes it a lot easier where the federal government has to, you know, go along with it. I mean, it's the power is in the hands of the people.

We need to keep remembering that it's our job to get this done more than anything else. Yes, and this is plug-and-play activism. So they're not just going to stop it. food dies or soda and snap. I mean, these are people that can be leveraged that this idea is going to gain momentum once they start having these wins. And they're also having, they're also kind of training their their activist immune system, if you will, because this next headline is what they're up against. Some of the, some of these new families that are protesting and going to these state houses are meeting the corporate lobbyists. So this headline here, talking about

West Virginia, it says, big soda flood state capital and unprecedented fashion to lobby against Maha. The American Beverage Association, who represents Pepsi Cola, Coca-Cola, and a plurality of other non-alcoholic beverages and soft drink corporations in America have had national representation in West Virginia's capital, Charleston, since the bill's passage, says it's very uncommon for ABA to send D.C. lobbyists to Charleston, Barrett, who rolled his own bill banning synthetic dyes and school lunches into the larger Senate bill, told the caller, the lobbyists have been threatening lawmakers with job losses and barren grocery store shelves. So this is what you're up against. You have these lobbyists coming in, just throwing out all types of fear, threatening, threatening job loss and threatening economic

disaster because you're going to ban some food dyes. I mean, these are the overreactions. Just to think what happens when we start really pushing on some nerve centers, people are going to see what we've seen for the last decade. And what these activist parents have been seeing for the last several decades when they go to those state houses and see the farmer lobbyists for just canvassing all over the place. So this is what's happening. And again, as I'm going to stick with this theme today, as we want to be incredibly judgmental and, you know, from our bark loungers in our living rooms, you know, I saw posts like, you know, red dye number three didn't cause autism, as though getting these chemicals out of our food is just a waste of time. I find that to be incredibly

short-sighted is the best words that I can come up with it. They're allowed on television. But I want to just say this. There's multiple things that are going on here. I'm shocked we have to talk about strategy. But not only are you seeing huge sweeping changes that are actually going to make people healthy. And for those people that do remove these products from their children's lives, many of them, when they have a vaccine injured child, when they recognize how bad this food is and start making a shift away from these foods, they talk about how it changes the health of their children. The autoimmune disease epidemic is definitely being fueled in a major part by this food.

We are spending billions of dollars because people are eating this stuff. So the costs are going to come down. But number one, Robert Kennedy Jr. right now is trying to build a national coalition for change. He's not on a vengeance strike to, you know, stand for Republicans and piss off every Democrat. He knows full well as. I mean, I think he still considers him a Democrat, himself a Democrat, in the original Kennedy's sense of the word. But what he recognizes is, I need the whole nation with me as I make these changes. As we make changes, if they're going to be lasting, they will not last.

We've watched this over and over again. If only half this country's along with it, it's a sand painting. And when it's all over, it switches back to the way it always was. Right now, with chemicals and food dye, he is building a coalition of every parent in America has to say right now, geez, that's a good idea. I mean, I thought this guy was a crazy guy, and I may not agree with his vaccine position, but I have to agree with this. I'm really happy he's cleaning up my food supply.

Oh, my God. I didn't know that EMFs were a problem. I mean, he's opening up conversations in places to meet them where they're at, to talk about something they can understand, to gain confidence in what he's doing. that it can move to bigger and bigger and bigger projects and ideas, but with a coalition that's unstoppable and will produce lasting change, folks. This is a journey. I know we all want it to happen overnight, but we're not children anymore.

Nothing worth, you know, doing is easy. Nothing worth doing happens overnight. It takes time. It takes strategy, and we have one of the best people in the world making this happen. And I mentioned up there Pepsi Cola, Coca-Cola. A lot of people don't know, but Big Tobacco got its playbook from Coca-Cola when they're basically covering the effects of some of their drinks, which are basically sugar water with a bunch of chemicals in them. And a lot of people say, I mean, we talk about these things with our team a lot. A lot of our team brings up, like, well, I have friends and they do this and they say, well, I drink, you know, I just, I drink a couple cans of soda a day or I eat some of the stuff with food die, but whatever.

big deal. Well, you know, besides diabetes and cardiovascular risks, increase in that, we've known that for decades. Here's another study that just came out making headlines. Shock study discovers popular drinks can cause deadly mouth cancer. So we look at the study and look at the findings of the study. And it says this cohort study of 124 oral cavity cancer cases from 162,602 women who participated in the nurse's health study found that oral cavity cancer risk 4.87 times higher in participants consuming one or more sugar-sweetened beverages daily compared to less than one sugar-sweetened beverage monthly. So if you're drinking basically a can of soda daily, you have a 4.87 times higher risk of oral cavity cancer than if you're not drinking

them but once a month. That's a pretty big deal. And these are the kind of studies. I mean, this is just one study, but when we see what kind of studies have been hidden from us, when the actual real studies start being done, I think people are going to be shocked what they see when it comes to, I mean, everything from our food supply to vaccine safety. This is the real revolution and people really need to buckle up for this. Yeah, amazing.