The Highwire with Del Bigtree - NEW STUDIES SHOW OBESITY IMPAIRS THE IMMUNE SYSTEM

Episode Date: March 18, 2025

New studies link failing immune health to obesity possibly driving the chronic disease epidemic. In brighter news, the shift in the health sphere continues as the Texas Senate passes several “Make Texas Healthy Again” initiatives and Ron DeSantis pushes to ban mandates on any mRNA vaccines.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

Let's talk about obesity for a second because this is a New York Post headline just recently, quoting a study. It says most adults expected to be overweight or obese by 2050. And it says in this article, overweight and obese people under 25 increased from $198 million to $493 million between 1990 and 2021. This is worldwide. That number is forecasted to reach $746 million by 2050. The study noted that we're gaining weight faster than previous generations and obesity is occurring early. So this is the actual study here from the Lancet, and it's a global forecast. And they looked at 1990 to 2021, so a relatively short window.

Then, of course, forecasting to 2050. And the idea of that, we know that obesity, you know, there's an increased rate of diabetes, there's an increased rate of heart disease. But let's talk about the immune system, direct specific immediate effects on the immune system. There is science. This is one out of the proceedings of a nutritional society, and it's titled, Impatement. of obesity on the immune response to infection. And it says strong epidemiological evidence highlighting an association between obesity and infection is accumulating. And there are rodent

models offering insight into potential mechanisms. An additional yet key consideration is how to how best to prevent and manage infections in this at-risk population. Antimicrobial drugs and vaccines may not function as intended in obese individuals. So science is finding this out on the back in, how many people are we backstating that these shots are not working as intended or giving antibiotics to that they're not working as intended because of, you know, weight problems or immune system signaling problems. But it goes on to talk about mice to these mice studies, these challenge studies. And this was one fascinating study. Diet-induced obesity and it impairs their immune system response to influenza virus infection. It says in males, in male diet-induced

obese mice, a secondary H1N1 influence a challenge following a primary H3N2 infection led to a 25% mortality rate with no loss of lean controls, 25% increase in lung pathology, failure to regain weight, and a 10 to 100-fold higher lung viral titers. And then it goes on, I mean, that is absolutely crazy, but it goes on to say memory CD8 plus T cells, these are the signaling cells from obese mice had a greater than 50% reduction in interferon gamma. That's a key cytokine in the immune system. You don't want that to down 50% when stimulated with influenza pulse denduric cells from lean mice.

Thus, the function of the influenza-specific memory T cells is significantly reduced and ineffective in lungs of obese mice. So you have literally the mucosal immunity of these mice affected. They can't launch this immune response to an influenza infection because they're, basically just their body is overweight. They're dealing with with that piece of it. So this is a huge shift in thinking and it really frames this conversation about weight loss in United States and the chronic disease epidemic and everything we're entering into. And you can see that the pharmaceutical companies are racing to get a front row seat at this table because we're talking culture change.

We're talking environmental change. I'm changing the way we eat. And this is what the pharmaceutical companies are doing just a couple of years ago. This is American Academy of Pediatrics. Consider drugs in surgery early for obesity and kids. These are new guidelines. They're saying these Ozympic and Wagovi, these injectable weight loss drugs. Consider those for kids because those should be the first line defense. And it just, you know, we do this every week now, but this week is no different. We have a whole new list of headlines here. Here's one. Ozympic patients losing key bodily functions as doctors warn of new terrifying side effect. Another one, Weight loss jabs like Ozypic trigger panic attacks and worsened anxiety experts discover.

They're discovering all this once it's out of the market and it's being used en masse. They're finding out all of these issues. But the positive side to this is that at the state level, there's bills being passed. And this is in Texas where you are, make Texas healthy again passes the Senate. So we're talking about reshaping the environment of food. Two bills here, Senate Bill 25 and Senate Bill 314. Senate Bill 25 is requiring daily activity, physical. activity in schools.

Fantastic. Yeah, it's putting on the food label of all the list of ingredients that are banned in other countries. It's also banning a list of dyes and chemicals and foods that are given to free lunch programs and things like that to kids. So both these bills move to the house now, which is super exciting. They were passed by basically 31 to 0 and 30 to 1, so almost unanimous, completely almost unanimous, one person borning against those.

And then when we talk about SNAP benefits, these are the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, there is a growing movement within the United States to get the chemicals and the terrible food, the sugary food out of that, high-fructose corn syrup, to get that away from the SNAP benefits. And right now we have, this is Newsweek. Ten states are challenging this rule, so they're asking the USDA to change this. One of those states is Texas. And in order to do this, they have to get a bill.

move the bill through hearings, and then once that bill gets signed, then the bill can formally ask the USDA to take this off. So Texas bill 379, which is the bill that's trying to prohibit the use of SNAP benefits for purchasing this junk food. This is basically for people that when they hear SNAP, this is like what we used to call food stamps. What they're saying, these bills are saying, food stamps can't be spent on like potato chips, sugar, product, cookies, cakes, and soda. It has to be on good food. It takes out. those sugar foods, which makes perfect sense. You know, you're trying to get people up and working and healthy so that they can get back

and find a job and all of those great things, and instead we're making them sicker and sicker. It makes perfect sense. Right. You don't want those empty calories that we know lead to gaining weight, which lead to a bunch of issues. And so in Texas, one of the bills there, SB 379, there was an interesting person that showed up to testify against the bill. Take a listen. All right.

My name is Alec Puente, and I'm the Director of Government Relations for the American Heart Association. I'm here to testify today in opposition to Senate Bill 379. The American Heart Association shares the goal of improving the health of Texans, and we're encouraged by this committee's focus on the links between nutrition and health. While improving Texans diet is a shared goal, the Heart Association is concerned about potential impacts of this bill on participation and population health. Imposing nutritional restrictions will interfere with the primary function of snap, reducing hunger, without reducing root causes of chronic disease.

I often say that I can never be surprised in this building, but for the American Heart Association to be against this bill, that might be the surprise of the session so far. I would encourage you to look at what it restricts. I don't know if y'all's bored voted on that. I mean, this is a perfect example of the cesspool of corporate, you know, capture of the American Heart Association. We've talked about the Cancer Association, all of these, you know, doing the bidding for soda companies to keep sugar products in SNAP. They sent someone from the American Heart Association to Texas. Make sure you don't let them make Texans healthy again. It's outrageous. It's outrageous.

I learned about root cause, but not that way. Right. Let's jump over to some more breaking news here. So just this morning, I prepared in the segment, and it was coming in hot and heavy. So we have this headline here, Trump's FDA and NIH Picks Clear Committee, teeing up final Senate confirmation. This is, of course, Dr. J. Bayacharya, 12 to 11 vote. He's weeks by, and then Marty McCari, Dr. Martin McCari, 14 to 9 vote.

according to the reports, this should be wrapped up in a couple of days. It should be a breeze right through there and out to their full nomination and acceptance. Those are great hearings, by the way. If you haven't watched them, definitely go to YouTube and just watch just how brilliant these two men are when they answer these questions. You watch them try to back them into corners. And we really, these are just good people, right? You had Jay Badacharya, you know, the Great Barrington Declaration, which we celebrated. We were one of the first news organizations to celebrate the work that he did saying,

do not lock this country down, open up the schools. Imagine this guy's about to be the head of the NIH. And Dr. Marty Macquarie has also been very outspoken when he needed to be about things. They all have something to learn. I'm not saying they're perfect. But they are really, you know, great, open-minded scientists and doctors, and those hearings were fantastic to watch. And with Badachara, you literally took the job of the guy who was trying to counsel him,

Francis Collins. That was pretty cool. I mean, can't write that. Exactly. So tomorrow we have Dr. Mement-Az. He is going to, this is tomorrow Friday. That's two in the Dirkston Senate office building, room 215, if anybody wants to go to that. Fantastic. This is for the nomination of the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid service, a CMS. So that is tomorrow. And then a piece of disappointing news for a lot of our viewers. we have Dr. David Weldon. He was supposed to be, we actually read for our show.

He was supposed to have his hearing for the head of the CDC. This is the headline here. White House withdraws David Weldon's nomination to be Trump's CDC director's sources say. Weldon actually released kind of his version of this. And he said he and Kennedy both received a call last night, about 12 hours before this hearing. And we're told that Susan Collins, Republican in Maine, and then of course one other Republican were having thoughts and considerations, making this, you know, because it's basically 12 Republicans, 11 Democrats, so that would have put it over.

Yeah, Dr. Cassidy, I think, who's been, you know, Bobby just squeaked by. He was very hard also in the hearings of Macri and Badacharya. He's talked about the fact that he was a pediatrician. He's really focused on vaccinations. We've covered a lot of the interaction with Robert Kennedy Jr. in him and Rand Paul, super interesting interaction, but it just shows you, right? There's no done deal in this space. You still have to get nominated.

I mean, you still have to, you know, get confirmed even after you're nominated. Really unfortunate for Dave Weldon. This is someone I've stood on stages with, just a powerful advocate for, I mean, for, you know, transparency in science, but even more so, one of those few politicians that throughout the years was listening to the mothers and the parents that were describing, vaccine injury. Some of the most important hearings ever happened in government happened with Dave Weldon. But, you know, I saw the writing on the wall when, you know, the article dropped last week that the CDC wants to do an investigation of vaccines and autism. I didn't talk to Bobby,

but I'm pretty sure that that came from the inside. It was, those are hit pieces masked as, you know, celebrations of Bobby. I think it was really designed to scare Cassidy and those. And obviously, Dave Weldon isn't going to make it. I do want to quickly say, though, for people, I have met Dr. Mehmet Oz spent some time with him. This is very, very talented. We think of him as a television host with a successful medical talk show.

In fact, he was our competition when I was a producer on the daytime talks with the doctors. But I was jealous. Dr. Oz was always covering more functional medicine, doctor, scientist, nutritionist, than we were very open-minded. And one of the world's greatest heart surgeons, don't realize that he is invented, you know, the clip that's used to fix one part of the heart,

like a super brilliant guy. I hope he goes gliding through because he's got great ideas to what to do with CMS. So again, you know, Bobby's trying to get his team around him, but looks like he lost one today. Yeah, and you know, there's a lot of people speculating on what actually happened. But with Weldon, it's very interesting because he does have this history and this was a withdrawal of the nomination, not a rejection. So for some reason, they didn't even want him to go in there and testify and face questioning. So that's very rare. There's only, you know, I think 18 or 19 withdraws throughout the entire history of the country when it comes to these cabinet appointees. So very, very interesting. But this is,

let's look at back in 2002. For people don't know who Dr. David Welton is, this is him in 2002. Literally, we're talking over 20 years ago. Take a listen. All right. The thing that I continue to find extremely disturbing is the fact that the CDC still does not allow researchers access to the vaccine safety data. If everything was so objective and any scientist at all can look at this stuff, it would be one thing, but they continue to deny people access to this information.

And until we get a free and open dialogue within the scientific community, I don't think, for one, I will ever be satisfied that there isn't some data suggesting that some children may have serious side effects from some of these vaccines that is really going undetected, unnoticed, and yes, it may actually cause autism. There is. May actually not allowed to even, you know, glance in that direction, but those were the Dan Burton hearing, super important for those people. This is a sad day, honestly, for parents of autistic children, because this guy was a real hero, a real champion, but obviously videos like this, and having had stood for this cause, I think, when it comes to Senator Cassie and a few that are really on the fence there, ends up delivering a death. below and he talked about it in his, I think it was, did he tweet it out or the statement that he made that they were calling him an anti-vaxor inside of these meetings, even though he was a pediatrician that is still giving vaccines as far as I know. So anyway, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, let's, well, let's move on to, we'll finish it off with some good news. Let's move on to Ron DeSantis,

governor of Florida. And he recently came out with his wife, First Lady, and they made a handful of statements, but this is one of the headlines that was generated from that. DeSantis calls for legislation to permanently ban MRI vaccine mandates, add vaccination status protections. He's calling for basically informed consent medical freedom. But his wife, Casey DeSantis, is calling it calling the CDC an utter disgrace for keeping the CDC vaccine on its recommended list for

children. So they're really forcing this. And you see this on a lot of states. I think this is one of the strongest move so far is really to ban this and to move forward. And they're also looking at taking fluoride out of the water as well following Utah's leads. So a lot of good things happening at the state level, even though at the federal level, it's still kind of touch and go. We're going to be watching Dr. Oz as well tomorrow. So fingers crossed for that.