The Highwire with Del Bigtree - Sen. Johnson Roundtable: “American Health and Nutrition: A Second Opinion”

Episode Date: September 28, 2024

Senator Ron Johnson and a panel of experts provide a foundational and historical understanding of the changes that have occurred over the last century within public sanitation, agriculture, food processing, and healthcare industries which impact the current state of national health.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

I'm going to stay through. After Peterson, it's a pleasure. I'm a huge fan. Nice to meet you. I've taken some inspiration. I feel much more comfortable. And I realized we could live at the computer. Thank you, sir.

I enjoyed your comments up there. That's good. Mike, check, check, check. I can hear it. Okay. Sibling antics. Well, good afternoon and welcome everybody. This event is titled American Health and Nutrition,

a second opinion. I want to thank all the people who have come here as an audience, live audience. I want to thank everybody who are watching this online. But I particularly want to thank all the participants. These are men and women who have tirelessly fought to provide the public, the type of information, the type of truth that the American public needs to hear,

and many of them, probably all of them, bear the scars for simply trying to tell the truth. Again, I truly appreciate your tireless years of effort, but also the fact you took the time out here to come and participate in this event. On January 24, 2022, I held a public event in this historic room titled COVID-19, a second opinion. It was held two years into the coronavirus pandemic, a pandemic that was used to frighten and control the public on a global scale. The result was a stunning loss of life and freedom for individuals, trillions of dollars economic devastation, but billions of dollars are profit and the accumulation of enormous power for those in control.

Fortunately, what happened during the pandemic opened the eyes of untold numbers of people around the world to the corruption and capture of government agencies, the media, medical journals, and the medical establishment by large corporate interests. Now that our eyes have been open to that reality, it is impossible to ignore that the same dynamic has occurred throughout governments and industries worldwide. The purpose of today's event is to ask questions we haven't been allowed to ask, to provide a foundational and historical understanding

of the changes that have occurred over the last century within public sanitation, agriculture, food processing, and health care industries that impact our current state of national health. Once we have described what has occurred, suggestions for steps we can take to put us on a better path will be discussed. As our panelists will detail, the current state of America's national health is not good. even though America's health care system spent $4.5 trillion in 2022 or over $13,000 per person. Those who seriously questioned the current orthodoxy or offer alternative treatments and approaches are generally ridiculed, vilified, and canceled, with a concerted effort made to destroy their reputations and careers.

We all witnessed this during the pandemic. as eminently qualified and respected doctors, who had the courage and compassion to treat COVID patients using cheap. Generic drugs were fired, sued, and either lost their medical licenses and certifications or had them seriously threatened. Unfortunately, this intimidation works, as most doctors remain silent

in order to maintain their good standing in the medical establishment. The catalyst for this event was an interview I saw, saw with Dr. Casey Means and her brother Callie. When it comes to nutrition, we all face the same daunting variety of opinions, guidelines, and diet recommendations. Dr. Means does an excellent job by simplifying the basic concept of how our bodies convert food to energy and how that miraculous process. And I want to underline that miraculous process can and has been impaired. I'm grateful that she and her brother have been able to join us here today. I'm also very pleased that Robert Kennedy Jr. is here. His environmental advocacy connected him to mothers with autistic children

and his subsequent advocacy for children's health and chronic illness. Because of corporate capture of regulatory agencies, the connection between environmental factors and pharmaceutical adverse impacts on health have not been adequately explored. Cali Means has helped assemble a highly qualified group of doctors and nutritional and fitness experts to discuss these issues and make a case for robust research into causes and effects. I'm extremely grateful for the time and effort all of these participants have devoted to these issues and to the event today. Again, the title of today's event is American Health and Nutrition, a second opinion, with emphasis on the word opinion.

I am truly amazed at how much knowledge mankind has accumulated over time and how rapidly the acquisition of knowledge has accelerated in our lifetimes. With that said, however, I still believe that what we don't know vastly exceeds what we do know. As we pursue a greater understanding of human health and seek answers to questions we have been discouraged to even ask, I sincerely hope we approach our quest with the humility and modesty that that reality demands. With that, I'm very pleased to introduce Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Really needs no introduction, but I have a short one. He's an environmental lawyer and the chairman and founder of Children's Health Defense.

He has spent 40 years fighting corrupt corporations and government agencies in efforts of restoring and protecting the health of children and ending childhood health epidemics by eliminating environmental exposures. Mr. Kennedy. I want to begin by thanking Senator Johnson for his courage and his gift that he had of critical thinking would survive the orchestrated fear that we fought. Now, we all encountered during the pandemic, he was the only member of this body for some time that was willing to challenge the orthodoxies.

He was subsequently joined by one other key member, Rand Paul. And he faced the same kind of vilification, the marginalization, the demonization, the discretization that he just referred to that was applied in such an extraordinary way to the scientists, the medical professionals, and the people, the individuals who were injured by some of these government policies who were systematically silenced, not only by the government agencies that are captured

by the pharmaceutical companies that were profiting by hundreds of billions from these policies and that exercised such an extraordinarily control over this body but also by the mainstream media in this country, which also gets

47% of its advertising revenue from the companies that profited during that period. Senator Johnson, you gave so many of us extraordinary hope during that period. I honestly don't know what would have happened to this country if you had not been there. and there was an extraordinary personal cost that you paid for it. You and I became not only professional associates but close personal friends during that period. And you are somebody that, in my mind, was a supervillain prior to the pandemic, and now you're one of my biggest heroes. I'm very grateful.

When discussing. improvements to U.S. healthcare policy. Politicians from both parties often say we have the best health care system in the world. That is a lie. The U.S. health care system is an existential threat to our country. If the American experiment fails, it will not be because we had the wrong marginal tax rate. It won't be because we have the – we don't have the perfectly optimized level of social safety net spending. It won't be because of the culture war and DEI issues and the media at the media trumpets

to orchestrate the division among all of us. No, if America fails, the chief reason will be because we let our country get sicker, more depressed, fatter, more infertile at an increasing rate while crippling our national security bankrupting our national budget with health care costs. Every major pillar of the U.S. health care system as a statement of economic fact

makes money when Americans get sick. The most valuable asset in this country today is a sick child. The pharma industry, hospital industry, and medical school industry make more money when there are more interventions to perform on America. And by requiring insurance companies to take no more than 15% of premiums, Obamacare actually incentivized insurance company to raise premiums to get 15% of a larger pie.

This is why premiums have increased 100% since the passage of Obamacare, making healthcare the largest driver of inflation while American life expectancy plummets. We spend four times per capita on healthcare that the Italians, but Italians live 7.5 years longer than us on average. Are we, and incidentally, Americans had the highest life expectancy in the world when I was growing up. Today we've fallen on average of six years behind our European neighbors. Are we lazier and more suicidal than Italians? Or is there a problem with our system?

Are there problems with our incentives? Are there problems with our food? During the COVID epidemic, we had the highest body count of any country in the world. We had 17% of the COVID deaths in this country. We only had 4.2% of the world's population. We literally had the worst record of any country in the world. all this should have been a blaring wake-up call to our weakened American immune systems, our health leaders said that COVID was a pharmaceutical deficiency.

This was a lie. We have the highest chronic disease rate on Earth, and according to the CDC, the average American who died from COVID had, on average, 3.8 chronic diseases. So these were people who had immune system collapse. who had mitochondrial dysfunction. And no other country has anything like this. Two-thirds of American adults and children suffer from chronic health issues.

50 years ago, that number was 1%. When my uncle was president, about 1% of the children in this country had chronic disease, today that number may be as high as 60%. In America, 74% of Americans are now overweight, or obese, including 50% of our children. 120 years ago, when somebody was obese, they were sent to the circus. There were case reports written about them. Obesity was virtually unknown.

Today, almost 50% of teens in the United States are overweight or obese. In Japan, the childhood obesity rate is 3%. Half of Americans have pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes. When I was 10 years old and my uncle was president, a typical pediatrician would see one case of type 2 of juvenile diabetes during his 40 or 50 year career. Today, one out of every three children who walked through his office door is diabetic or pre-diabetic.

And the same mitochondrial disorder that causes diabetes is also causing the epidemic of Alzheimer's in this country, which is now classified as diabetes. And it's causing this country more than our military budget every year. It is a crisis that 77% of our kids are too disabled to serve in the United States military. In my generation, the odds and rate of autism were about 1 in 10,000. And in my kids' generation, one in every 34 children. In the state of California, where I live, it's 1 in 22. And by the way, there has been no change in diagnosis, which is the industry alibi. Study after study, there's been no change in screening either.

Study after study shows that this is a change in incidents. We are in the midst of an epidemic. Why are we allowing this to happen to our children? These are the most precious assets that we have in this country. How can we let this happen to them? How can we call ourselves a moral nation, the exemplary democracy in the world, if we are treating our children like this?

About 18% of American teens now have fatty liver disease. fatty liver disease. That disease, when I was a boy, only affected late-stage alcoholics who were elderly. Cancer rates are skyrocketing in the young and old. Young-adult cancers are up 79 percent, and one in four American women is on antidepressant medication. 40 percent of teens have a mental health diagnosis. Fifteen percent of high schoolers are on anterol. and half a million American children are on SSRIs. No other country has anything like this. So what's causing all of this suffering?

I'll name two culprits. First and worse is ultra-processed foods. 70% of American children's diets is now ultra-processed, which means industrial manufactured in a factory. These foods consist primarily of processed sugar, ultra-processed grain, and seed oils. Laboratory scientists, many of them, whom were formally working for the cigarette industry, which purchased all of the big food companies in the 1970s and 80s, deployed there are thousands

of scientists to invent new chemicals to make our food more addictive. And these ingredients didn't exist 100 years ago. Humans are not biologically adapted to eat them. of these chemicals are now banned in Europe, but they are ubiquitous in American processed foods. We are literally poisoning our children systematically for profit. The second culprit is toxic chemicals in our food, our medicine, and our environment. Pesticides, food additives, pharmaceutical drugs, and toxic waste permeate every cell in our bodies. This assault on our children's cells and hormones is unrelenting. They are swimming around in a toxic soup. And to name just one problem,

many of these chemicals increase estrogen. Because young children are ingesting so many of these hormone disruptors, America's fertility rate has now dropped. Sperm counts in teens are about 50% of what they were a couple of generations ago, and testosterone rates have grown this, have dropped in the same rate. American puberty rates among our little girls is now 10 to 13 years of age. Our country has the earliest puberty rate of any continent. This is six years younger than it was in 1900. This is not normal. Breast cancer is also estrogen driven and now strikes one in eight women. We are mass poisoning all of our children and all of our adults. Industry lobbyists have made sure that most of the food stamp lunch program, about 70% of foods, most of the school

lunch program, about 70% of food stamps are processed foods. We give eight times as much subsidies to tobacco in this country than we do to fruits and vegetables. It makes no sense if we want a healthy country. The good news is that we can change all this and we can change it very, very, very quickly. And it starts with taking a sledgehammer to corruption. There's conflicts in our regulatory agency and in this building. These conflicts have transforms our regulatory agencies into predators of our regulatory agencies into predators against the American people and particularly our children. 80% of NIH grants go to people who have conflicts of interest. And these scientists are allowed to collect royalties

of $150,000 a year on the products that they develop at NIH and then form out to the pharmaceutical industry. The FDA, the USDA, and CDC are all controlled by giant for-profit corporate corporate. Their function is no longer to improve and protect the health of Americans. Their function is to advance the mercantile and commercial interests of the pharmaceutical industry that has transformed them and the food industry that has transformed them into sock puppets or the industry they're supposed to regulate.

Seventy-percent of FDA funding does not come from taxpayers. It comes from pharma. Farm executives and consultants and lobbyists cycle in and out of these agencies. Money from the health care industry has compromised our regulatory agencies and to this body as well. The reality is that many congressional health care staffers are worried about impressing their future bosses at pharmaceutical companies rather than doing the right thing for American children. Today, over 100 members of Congress support a bill. to fund OZMPIC with Medicare at $1,500 a month.

Most of these members have taken money from the manufacturer of that product, a European company called Novo Nordisk. As everyone knows, once a drug is approved for Medicare, it goes to Medicaid. And there is a push to recommend OZMPIC for Americans as young as six over a campaign. condition obesity that is completely preventable and barely even existed 100 years ago.

Since 74% of Americans are obese, the cost of all of them, if they take their OZemic prescriptions, will be $3 trillion a year. This is a drug that has made Novo Nordus the biggest company in Europe. It's a Danish company, but the Danish government does not recommend it. It recommends a change in diet to treat obesity and exercise. Virtually Novo Nordus entire value is based upon its projections of what OZemPEC is going to sell to Americans. Or half the price of OZempic, we could purchase regeneratively raised organic agriculture,

organic food for every American three meals a day, and gym membership for every obese American. Why are members of Congress doing the bidding of this Danish company instead of standing up for American farmers and children? Because Novo Nordis is one of the largest funders of medical research, the media and politicians, and the medical schools all go along with them. For 19 years, solving the childhood chronic disease crisis has been the central goal of my life. And for 19 years, I have prayed to God every morning to put me in a position to end this calamity. I believe we have the opportunity for transformational, bipartisan change to transform American health, to hypercharge our human capital, to improve our budget, and I believe to save our spirits and our country.

I am grateful for Senator Johnson's focus on this country's most important issue. Thank you. Well, thank you, Bobby. And thank you for your kind words at the start of your talk. You mentioned the word courage. I don't know anybody who doesn't demonstrate courage more than you have. I don't know anybody who's been more vilified and ridiculed and marginalized and canceled or paid as heavy a personal price for advocating for children's health, for making decisions

you made over the last couple of years, and literally in the last month or two. Not only is your concentration on chronic health something is unbelievably important for this nation. I think, as Tucker Carlson said about Dr. Casey means, help change the world. What you have demonstrated in your new alliance, setting differences aside, concentrating in an area of agreement, I think represents exactly how we as Americans can unify and heal this nation. So again, what you have demonstrated in your contribution is just priceless. So God bless you. Thank you. Our next presenter is Michaela Peterson Fuller.

Ms. Fuller is a podcaster, lifestyle, and diet blogger, the co-founder and CEO of Peterson Academy, and the founder of Fuller Health and the Lion Diet. The Lion Diet is a therapeutic and plant-free ketogenic diet that can be used to treat autoimmunity and psychiatric disorders. On the Michaela Peterson podcast, she discusses health, cultural phenomena, politics, and other topics. Ms. Floyd. Thank you very much.

I'm going to skip my intro. When I was two, I started to limp, and at seven, I was diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis and 37 joints. At age eight, I was put on injectable immunosuppressants. At 12, I was diagnosed with severe depression and put on antidepressants. At 14, I was diagnosed with idiopathic hypersomnia. which is a fancy definition for chronic fatigue, and I could barely get out of bed for years. My hip and ankle were replaced when I was 17

from the arthritis that wasn't managed by the medications I was on, and I spent a year on OxyContin, limping around what felt like broken bones trying to stay hopeful and not kill myself. I went to University for Biomedical Science when it became apparent that nobody in the medical system could help me, and the life-saving treatments I was on weren't saving my life. When I was 23, I completely changed my diet, which was radical, and I didn't think it was going to work.

I removed processed foods and only ate whole foods, primarily meat, and my life changed rapidly. I felt like I had stepped out of hell. I didn't know that I was trapped in into heaven. It turned my world upside down. Then I had to get off of the medications I was on. Antidepressant withdrawal that neither me nor my doctors knew existed was worse than the opiate withdrawal I had been through. after I was treated with Oxycontin. After I stopped taking the eight medications I was on

and had a baby, my autoimmune symptoms and depression started sneaking back in. And willing to do anything to not be sick, I tried, and this sounds ridiculous, but I tried eating only meat. And by that I mean beef, salt and water only, knowing beef was the one food that didn't contribute to my arthritis and depression.

Eating only meat put my symptoms into remission again in six weeks. I've only been eating beef and lamb for seven years now in order to keep my symptoms in remission. I'm not on any medication. I have no symptoms of disease. I'm in complete remission after spending 16 years being medicated with multiple joints replaced. I spent seven years trying to get the medical community to take this seriously and conduct some studies. The plant-free ketogenic diet I'm on, which is what it is, it's gone viral on TikTok, has over 500,000 people following it on social media.

the number of Google searches for these ketogenic diets has skyrocketed since about 2017. I have groups online with over 30,000 people who follow the same diet as me for autoimmunity and mental disorders that they've been unable to treat any other way. These people are putting their diseases into remissions after decades. This way of treating disease has garnered international attention from the Times to Fox to Sky News Australia. The problem is most people don't know that what they're consuming is making them sick. They know junk food is bad, but they don't realize it's causing chronic disease, and neither do their health care providers. When you're diagnosed with a mental or autoimmune disorder, diet and the state of your gut isn't even mentioned.

If it is brought up, you're ostracized. One of the leading theories to get a bit nerdy in understanding chronic illness is increased intestinal permeability, which you can measure with lab work, with zonulin levels. In a healthy digestive system, the gut lining serves as a barrier, allowing nutrients to pass through while keeping harmful substances out of the bloodstream. However, because of the high-carb recommendations and ultra-processed foods we're exposed to and chemicals, we're currently encouraged to consume from the food pyramid and our doctors, our diets damaged our gut barrier, which causes particles from the gut to leak into the bloodstream. A lot of the chemicals and preservatives

and foods we consume are actually illegal in other countries. I spent years so livid at the medical industry that I wouldn't go into a hospital. How dare I be treated with medications and end up losing joints when dietary intervention works? How dare these medical doctors tell me there was nothing I can do? I'd never be where I am today without this diet. I truly believed I would have died. I'm not suggesting the average person does this extreme version of a ketogenic diet. I am specifically suggesting that this diet is researched as a potential treatment for autoimmunity and psychiatric disorders with the goal of eventually healing the gut and reintroducing more healthy, whole foods, and that the ideological war on meat needs to end. I've seen tens of thousands of people

see complete remission in as little as six weeks. Most drugs don't work that fast, and no drug fixes the root cause. Approximately one in four Americans are on psychiatric medications for psychiatric illness, and approximately one in ten has an autoimmune disorder. I believe all these millions of people could be symptom-free with proprietary diet, dietary interventions ranging from low carb to ketogenic to plant-free ketogenic to whole food depending on the severity of the illness. Dietary intervention is what doctors should suggest first before putting people on medications that do not treat the underlying problem, some of which cause horrible dependence making them nearly impossible to get off of. Treating chronic disease,

which we now know is caused by the environment and our diet without looking at diet as the treatment should be considered malpractice. My request, shared by millions of people using these diets to treat themselves, is for the government to fund studies on ketogenic and plant-free ketogenic diets as potential treatments for autoimmunity and psychiatric disorders. There are only a few studies on this

because of the lack of funding. One study shows remission in treatments of Crohn's disease, which is a terrible intestinal autoimmune disorder that can result in people using colossomy bags for the rest of their life. and other study shows complete remission of anorexia. Unless people start being treated with dietary interventions, using these ketogenic diets,

and the food pyramid prioritizes meat and low-carb whole foods so that people can avoid becoming chronically ill in the first place. And Americans are told that the ultra-processed foods aren't just unhealthy, they're making us chronically ill. America's going to get fatter, sicker, more mentally ill and more expensive. If the government funds these studies, America could be at the forefront of these scientific discoveries. Thank you very much for your time. It's an honor to be here. Thank you, Michaela. By the way, the format of this is opening statements. If there are some questions following up again,

I'll encourage the panelists, just do that. And I'll recognize. I just have one quick question, Michaela. This seems to be a pretty dramatic solution for you. How did you arrive at? I mean, what doctors, I mean, do this on your own with your father? Or, I mean, how did you come to this solution? So, originally, I, the processed foods are just eating meat, just eating meat. That was sheer desperation. So my autoimmune symptoms started to come back after I had a baby and got off all the medications.

And I knew that I had got them under control in the first place with diet. And that wasn't doing enough for me. And so I figured, why not reduce my diet to one variable that, I hope is sustainable. Turns out it is sustainable. That was mostly based on hope. And then the idea was to reintroduce other foods and figure out what was causing reactions.

Now, I'm still on the diet, which is why research needs to be done. Maybe if research is done, we can figure out how to get other foods in. You did this all on your own. There was no doctor that recommend this to you. You just did this strictly on your own. Oh, yeah. My rheumatologist dropped me.

My doctors dropped me. It was infuriating. Well, again, thank you for sharing that. story. Our next presenter is Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. Dr. Peterson, by the way, also bears a few scars from trying to convey the truth to people. His renowned psychologist, author, and online educator, his best-selling books include 12 Rules for Life and Beyond Order. They have sold millions of copies worldwide. Dr. Peterson's lectures and podcasts consistently attract large audiences, providing valuable insights into topics such as mythology, psychology, and personal development.

Dr. Peterson, thanks for being here. Thank you very much, Senator, and it is a pleasure and an honor to be here. I'm speaking today as a clinical research scientist. This is an endeavor with which I have some familiarity, because I've conducted many such studies, and I'm aware of their difficulty. I'm also speaking as a clinician and a parent and a sometime philosopher of science. We'll start with the general in this discussion and move to one. towards the specific.

Generally, it's vital to understand that science itself is an ethical, even a philosophical-slash-religious enterprise. Why? Because the scientists who advance humanity inevitably operate within an a-priory framework of faith. What are the elements of that faith?

Belief that the world is orderly in its foundation. its nature and its spirit, belief that such order is understandable to the mind of man and woman, belief that the pursuit of such understanding is possible and laudable, and a belief that good itself will come of the pursuit of understanding. There's a meta-principle that underlies these more explicit rules, and that is that the understanding, the understanding that the scientific aim, must be true for the truth to be revealed. This means that science aimed at career, prestige, professorship, and funding to say nothing of darker motivations such as pride, revenge, or the wish

for destruction is not science at all. Much of what purports to be science now is instead the garnering of personal credit, career advancement, and economic gain that all derivative and essentially parasitic activity can temporarily produce. This not does not result in truth. We should also not be confusing medicine as currently taught and practiced with science. The education of modern physicians may familiarize them with the basics of physiology and biology and the details of their specific practice. This is by no means the same thing. teaching them how to conduct or evaluate scientific research, which is something that takes years of specialized training to manage.

Why am I making these points? So that we understand explicitly that aim and ethical orientation define the scientific pursuit. And so that we pay enough attention here today to establishing that aim and ensuring that orientation. When you're a scientist and you're doing statistical analysis, It's easy to believe, for example, if you don't know anything about science or statistical analysis, that the statistical process is a mathematics machine into which you pour data and crank out truth. And that is just absolutely not how it works at all.

When you're doing statistical analysis, you're making a thousand micro-decisions, every single one of which is ethical. You have to decide which numbers to include and which numbers to exclude, and you have to understand why. And you have to work against your own hypothesis and even against your own research interest to ensure that you're not deluding yourself in the public And if you're a careerist or interested in prestige, then all of that goes out the window and what you produce will be highly misleading to you and everyone else And it's very difficult to orient yourself so that you fight against that you have to be terrified of the falsehoods that you might produce and where they might lead you and everyone else And so now having considered that you have to start to understand

what it is that should constitute your aim. What would it require in the case that we're discussing to make America truly healthy again and to orient true scientists toward that aim? It's a retooling of the research enterprise from the top down as well as the bottom up so that the goal would be clear. The incentives aligned

and the most productive actors identified, rewarded, encouraged, and capitalized. This could be facilitated politically by making a more specific goal clearer. We could begin that, as we should, by formulating an appropriate diagnosis. We need to get the problem right. What is the major problem? What are the major problems bedeviling the American people?

One such is public health, clearly, and more so all the time. Despite the extensive government spending in that domain, and despite the negligible attention historically paid to the details of health research and practice by the political class. American children are fat, diabetic, and increasingly miserable. As they progress towards middle age, those yet not captured in childhood, by obesity, insulin resistance, high blood sugar, and inflammatory dysfunction are likely to suffer it then, with near certainty by the onset of a declining old age. And expensively so, what might we aim for instead?

Slim, healthy, athletic, optimistic, and courageous children. Strong, psychologically integrated, generous adults. Resilient, active, productive seniors still contributing to their communities. Combined with either or both of much less spending or much better results, for the cost. How could this aim be accomplished within the community of health-focused researchers and practitioners and incentivized politically? America faces a multi-dimensional diagnostic conundrum. Its people suffer from a plethora of symptoms and syndromes, too high and increasing body mass indices, rising blood sugar levels, associated risk for

psychological disorder, immunological dysregulation that increases risk of neurological degeneration, cancer and heart disease, to name a few. My daughter referred earlier to her terrible childhood experiences, inquiry and experimentation, communication of all that, and the social consequences among a multitude of people with various chronic health conditions. What was her prime scientifically relevant realization. The answer to this question. What do all fat, sick, unhappy people have in common?

At least this. They all eat. How could that brute and singular fact be varied and studied? It's a technical discourse on the formulation of adequate scientific hypotheses. Epidemiological studies, associating any given dietary habit with some outcome of health, inevitably fail, trying as they are to establish a correspondence between only two factors in a sea of causal possibility. Science can only progress, genuine science can only progress, when such inquiry is simplified, radically, so that single variables of interest can be assessed for causal significance. This is difficult to manage in the case of diet, but it no longer seems impossible.

The reason? Because of the actual possibility of radical simplification on the food consumption side. Elimination diets offer a potential solution to this problem. Most of them make little sense, however, conceptually or scientifically, they eliminate foods in an often random and fadish manner, often because of the spoken or unspoken ideological concerns of their proponents. In addition, they're insufficiently simple. The range of foods involved,

so that scientific analysis of causality can take place, must be reduced to the minimum for genuine analysis of causality to take place. You're chronically ill. You have a plethora of symptoms. You eat a multitude of foods. There's some relationship between the food and the outcome, at least in principle.

How are you going to determine that? Well, no simple analysis is possible because of the multiplicity of factors, both on the symptom side and on the dietary side. So you reduce the complexity of your diet, optimally to a single variable. Well, that's what my daughter Michaela did. Now, we know some things about such reduction. These are things that are important to know. Ketogenic diets switch the body to fat metabolism, so they constitute a lot. step in that direction. If you flip your body to fat metabolism and your symptoms decline,

then you know that the metabolic illness that you're suffering from has some association with glucose metabolism. Now, Michaela, I believe, or perhaps, yeah, it was Michaela, mentioned the fact that for a century childhood epilepsy has been treated with a ketogenic diet because your brain won't go into convulsions if you're not feeding it sugar. That's a good example of simplification to a single variable. Now, another alternative or associated issue with ketogenic diets is restriction of carbohydrate and sugar intake. So they eliminate the contribution of the glucose-dependent metabolic pathway to obesity, insulin resistance slash diabetes and inflammation. Your body can burn sugar or it can burn fat. And in our society, we run primarily on glucose metabolism,

but there's no necessity for that, not least because there is no recommended daily allowance for carbohydrate. Right. You can live with zero carbohydrate, and zero is not a lot. So that's a remarkable fact in and of itself, given that the primary caloric source in our diet that we have in our diet is actually carbohydrate. So that can be eliminated, and the consequences analyzed, and that can happen relatively quickly, and people can do it, and it's inexpensive, and it doesn't harm people. So those are all very good things from a research perspective. The consequence of a ketogenic intake, switch to ketogenic intake, can be analyzed as well. You can monitor weight, blood sugar, and assorted symptoms of inflammation, including those associated with psychological disorder.

The anecdotal evidence that we've picked up, because many, many people have communicated with our family, is that the typical obese person can expect to lose 7 to 20 pounds per month on a ketogenic or plant-free ketogenic diet, that that will continue month after month until virtually all of their body fat is eliminated, that they can do that with no hunger, although there will be some cravings, which are not precisely the same thing, and that that's actually maintainable over the long run. With that reduction in obesity comes radical improvement in blood sugar, for example, and often an improvement in the kinds of psychological conditions that Dr. Chris Palmer, for example, has been studying. It's a very remarkable concatenation of positive effect,

Some of which are quite unexpected, especially I would say on the depression and anxiety side, because those have been viewed for a very long time as consequences of life stress and trauma, and that can't happen. But the fact that the psychological disorder seem amenable to treatment by ketogenic or plant-free ketogenic diets could be nothing short of a revolution. Those are very intractable conditions, and there are also sources of unbelievably immense suffering. plant-free ketogenic diets, that's a carnivorous diet, let's say, or even more restricted, a carnivorous diet that's restricted to ruminant animals, push that simplification to its extreme.

Well, why would you do that? Well, if you're trying to conduct a true scientific analysis, let's say, of the relationship between diet and health, you'd want to reduce the diet to the simplest possible underlying, what would you say, the simplest possible underlying maintainable structure. And we know that that can be attained with a carnivorous diet. You can live on that for a very long time. In fact, whole societies have done that for, like the Inuit in northern Canada. They've survived on primarily meat for, well, their entire cultural history.

So we know that that's possible. If your symptoms don't resolve in consequence, well, then there's no loss, except that it's a difficult diet to attempt. And if they do resolve, well, that's a pretty good. good deal for you and then it's inexpensive and there's going to be all sorts of corollary benefits and then with any luck if your symptoms do resolve and you find the diet too restrictive you can start by introducing one food category at a time and carefully and so with any luck you'll be able to get back to something approximating hopefully not a typical american diet that's sugar and carbohydrate

loaded but at least one that's varied enough to maintain your interest none of this seems impossible and the more I've thought about this as a scientist and I came to these conclusions with great hesitancy by the way because I know it's quite a radical solution but as I was thinking it through as a scientist it just became more and more obvious it's like you don't want to hurt people when you're attempting to generate a solution to a health problem that they have and a ketogenic diet certainly won't hurt them it might help if it doesn't well you then you can stop doing it it's very inexpensive it's within at least in principle with

in the behavioral realm that people can manage. And it's simple enough so that you can actually do a causal analysis. Plus, the results appear quickly enough so that that's maintaining and rewarding in and of itself. That's a pretty good list of positive possibilities. And so there's another advantage as well with regards to ketogenic or plant-free ketogenic diets is that the people on them don't have to be hungry.

So most of the time when people are considering something like weight loss, they think they have to go on a diet. So they need to go on a diet, they need to lose 30 pounds or 40 pounds or 50 or 100 pounds. And then the theory is they've lost the weight, and they can go off the diet, which they want to do, because they're always hungry on the diet, and no one can maintain that. And then they go off the diet, they go back to their old eating habits, and bang, they weigh exactly what they weighed,

or more because that's the typical pattern as a consequence of over-reading in relationship to the food deprivation. On a ketogenic diet you don't have to be hungry. You can eat as much as you want and they're very satiating and so that doesn't seem to be a problem and it's something that's sustainable in the long run. The most important thing however as far as I'm concerned from the scientific perspective is the radical simplification of the causal analysis, right? If you go on a ketogenic or plant-free ketogenic diet and your symptoms remit, you know that there's some relationship

between what you're consuming and the health outcome. And so that's exactly what you want to know if you're chronically ill, and maybe, well, then you're fortunate as well, because it's remitted, you can start to experiment and see if you can find out the actual cause, and that opens up the scientific endeavor to a much broader, in a much broader way, because that would mean that we could reduce

the typical chronically ill person's diet to a ketogenic or plant-free ketogenic diet. And then we could do causal analysis with different classes of food to see which classes of food we're contributing to which downstream illnesses. And so that would be a real good deal for everyone too. And this sort of scientific endeavor is certainly technically possible. It's difficult to find participants and clinical research is a difficult endeavor. But none of this is impossible.

And the additional advantage also is that it's not going to hurt people. Okay, so, we'll close with this. What is the most logical, upward- aiming, scientific approach to the problem of American health? Identification of diet as the potential common mechanism. Radical simplification of that diet.

Analysis of programmatic variation of that simplified diet as food items are added in by category one by one. Those with chronic and tractable illnesses could thus well be placed by default, on a plant-free ketogenic diet for the several mere months that it would take to assess the consequences. This is a revolutionary but manageable proposition. Before it becomes a generalized standard of care, however, the relevant studies should be done. We have more than sufficient anecdotal data pertaining to the positive effect of such simplified diets.

The testimony of thousands of people, which is not sufficient to constitute proof, but is certainly sufficient to justify hypotheses. The goal is held. health. The approach is generally of upward aim and commitment to the truth. The specific strategy is restriction of all extraneous dietary variables. Analysis of the consequences of that restriction and then systematic variation with the return to a more varied diet. Simple, elegant, implementable, necessary. The alternative given the crisis that confronts us on multiple health fronts is dreadful. The continued sickening of the American people, with all the unsustainable

economic burden that sickening is and will continue to produce. Demoralization, decline in productivity, and spiraling health care costs that are already mounting to the point of unsustainability. We could replace that miserable future with something much brighter and healthier if we had the moral and political will to do so. Thank you for a lot. Thank you, Dr. Peterson. Our next presenter, Dr. Marty McCarrie, also bears a few scars from telling the truth during COVID.

Dr. McCarrie is a surgeon and public policy researcher at Johns Hopkins University. He writes for the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal and is the author of two New York Times bestselling books on accountable and the price we pay. He has been an outspoken opponent of broad vaccine mandates and some COVID restrictions at schools. Dr. McCarrie holds degrees from Bucknell University, Thomas Jefferson University, and Harvard University.

Dr. McCarrie. Thank you, Senator, and thank you, Senator, and Mr. Kennedy for the honor to present here. I'm trained in gastrointestinal surgery. My group at Johns Hopkins does more pancreatic cancer surgery than any hospital in the United States. But at no point in the last 20 years has anyone stopped to ask, Why has pancreatic cancer doubled over those 20 years? Who's working on that? Who's looking into it?

We are so busy in our health care system, billing and coding and paying each other, and every stakeholder has their gigantic lobby in Washington, D.C. And everybody's making a lot of money, except for one stakeholder, the American citizen. They are financing this giant expensive health care system through their paycheck deduction for health insurance and the Medicare excise tax. As we go down this path of billing and coding and medicating, and can we be real for a second,

we have poisoned our food supply, engineered highly addictive chemicals that we put into our food. We spray it with pesticides that kill pests. What do you think they do to our gut lining in our microbiome? And then they come in sick. The GI tract is reacting. it's not an acute inflammatory storm, it's a low-grade chronic inflammation. And it makes people feel sick. And that inflammation permeates and drives so many of our chronic diseases that we didn't see half a century ago.

Who's working on? Who's looking into this? Who's talking about it? Our health care system is playing whack-a-mole on the back end, and we are not talking about the root causes of our health care. chronic disease epidemic. We can't see the forest from the trees sometimes. We're so busy in these short visits, billing and coding. We've done a terrible thing to doctors. We've told them, put your head down, focus on billing and coding. We're going to measure you by your throughput. And good job. You did a nice job. We have all these numbers to show for it. Well, the country is getting

sicker. We cannot keep going down this path. We have the most over-medicated, sickest population in the world. and no one is talking about the root causes. The Pima Indians are the perfect example. Here is a group where the obesity, diabetes rate was less than 1%. The land in New Mexico and Arizona had its river supply diverted by ranchers and settlers, and the land and the soil was destroyed. The government recognizing this tremendous injustice

started to send free government food, but it wasn't organic kale and fruit and vegetables. It was processed and junk food. Instantly, the Pima Indians developed an obesity, diabetes rate of 90%. And what did the United States government do? What did our health care system do? The NIH dispatches its researchers to draw the blood of the Pima Indians to look for a gene that predisposes them to obesity and disease. diabetes. What are our leaders doing? The H&N NIH is supposed to stand for health.

Were they spending their money on food as medicine and looking at the estrogen-binding properties of pesticides that are driving our fertility rates down? They're funding research in Wuhan, China, and they're funding research on a new food compass to replace the misinformation they put out with the food pyramid telling us Lucky Charms is healthier than steak. Somebody has got to speak up. Maybe we need to talk about school lunch programs, not just putting every kid on obesity drugs, like OZMPIC. Maybe we need to talk about treating diabetes with cooking classes, not just throwing insulin at everybody. Maybe we need to talk about environmental exposures that cause cancer, not just the chemo to treat it. We've got to talk about food

as medicine and research these areas. 20% of our nation's kids are on medication. and as you heard, half are obese or overweight. Are they more disobedient than children in Japan, or have we poisoned the food supply? Is this a chronic disease epidemic that has been a direct result of what adults have done to children? We like to blame people for their diseases, but maybe we need to look inward.

We see all these shiny objects thrown at us. politicians talk about oh we've got a new health care proposal medicare can now negotiate the prices of 10 generic drugs don't be fooled these are things in the periphery it's not to say they don't have merits but the proposed uh program savings in year one by their own description is six billion dollars in a 4.5 trillion dollar economy that's expanding at 8% per year in the commercial sector that's a $200 billion expansion, we save $6 billion. The best way to lower drug costs in the United States are to stop taking drugs we don't need. So Dr. McCarrie, I've got a couple questions. First of all, how many years have you been practicing medicine? Twenty-two years.

So we've noticed a shift from, you know, decades ago when 80 percent of doctors were independent to now 80 percent are working for some hospital association. First of all, what has that meant in terms of doctors' independence and who they are really accountable to. Look, the move towards corporate medicine and mass consolidation that we've witnessed in our lifetime has meant more and more doctors are told to put their heads down, do your job, billing and coding, short-pinsons. We've not given doctors the time, research, or resources to deal with these chronic diseases. Yeah, I used to comment frequently during the COVID pandemic that doctors should be at the tip of the treatment pyramid,

they're being crushed at the bottom. What happens to a doctor who puts their patient first and tries to practice outside the guideline, tries to do something outside the recommended protocol, which is risk-free, don't get in trouble for doing that. What happens if you do step outside that to advocate for your patient? Well, increasingly now we have a misinformation police, although the greatest perpetrator of misinformation has been the United States government with the food pyramid.

Demonizing saturated fat, telling us that arsenic levels are acceptable at a certain rate when they don't know. Putting their head in the sand as we're watching these chronic disease epidemics, spending money on research on mating habits of Japanese quail on cocaine. I mean, these are real government grants. Where's the grant on pesticides and school lunch programs? I'll follow up. I had doctors around a similar table, again, back in the COVID-19 and second opinion panel.

And, I mean, they were fired, they were sued. They had their board certifications rescinded. How effective is that in terms of how it intimidates other doctors? And again, I love doctors. They saved my daughter's life. They literally are saving her life today. So I have nothing but reverence for doctors. But I also understand the pressures

of working for an organization that you follow this protocol, don't step outside the system? I mean, how effective is that intimidation? Well, it's, of seeing a few of your colleagues no longer be able to practice medicine, all that training, all your dedication, your patient's gone. The purpose of science is to challenge deeply held assumptions. That's how we advance the field and discover things.

We're not discovering things right now. And by the way, the NIH, we just did an analysis. one in six grants goes to health, equity, and disparities research. Well, just describing these differences is not interesting. We've known about them. Reducing the disparities is interesting, and that's what we have to do by talking about our poison food supply. Thank you for speaking out and telling people the truth.

We're going to switch up the order a little bit. We're going to stick with our doctor panel here. Next, we're going to have really the person who is the catalyst for this event with her book Good Energy, her interview with Tucker, that I saw that inspired me. I'm going to change my habits. But Dr. Casey Means is a medical doctor, New York Times bestselling author,

tech entrepreneur, levels, aspiring regenerative gardener and an outdoor enthusiast. While training as a surgeon, she saw how broken and exploitative the healthcare system is and let to focus on how to keep people

out of the operating room. And again, I would highly recommend everybody read good energy. It's a personal story, and you will be glad you did. Dr. Means. Thank you, Senator Johnson. As a physician, the message I'm here to share, and at this point echo. No, I was going to say, I'm just pointing to Dr.

The message I'm here to share and reiterate is that American health is getting destroyed. It's being destroyed because of chronic illness. And if the current trends continue, if the graphs continue in the way that they're going, at best we're going to face profound societal instability and decreased American competitiveness. And at worst, we're going to be looking at a genocidal level health collapse in our country and the world. Over the last 50 years in the United States, we have seen rapidly rising rates of chronic illnesses throughout the entire body, the body and the brain, infertility, obesity, tight to diabetes and prediabetes, Alzheimer's dementia, cancer, heart disease, stroke, autoimmune disease,

migraines, mental illness, chronic pain, fatigue, and general abnormalities, chronic liver disease, autism, and infant and maternal mortality, all going up. Americans live eight fewer years compared to people in Japan or Switzerland, and life expectancy is going down. I took an oath to do no harm. But listen to these stats. We're not only doing harm.

We're flagrantly allowing harm. While it sounds grim, there is very good news. We know why all of these diseases are going up, and we know how to fix it. Every disease I mentioned is caused by, or worsened by, metabolic dysfunction, a word that is thrilling to hear being used around this table. Metabolic dysfunction is a fundamental distortion of our cellular biology. It stops our cells from making energy appropriately. According to the American College of Cardiology,

metabolic dysfunction now affects 93.2% of American adults. This is, quite literally, this cellular draining of our life force. This process is the result of three processes happening inside our cells, mitochondrial dysfunction, a process called oxidative stress, which is like a wildfire inside ourselves, and chronic inflammation throughout the body and the gut, as we've heard about. metabolic dysfunction is largely not a genetic issue. It's caused by toxic American ultra-processed industrial food, toxic American chemicals, toxic American medications, and our toxic sedentary indoor lifestyles.

You would think that the American health care system and our government agencies would be clamoring to fix metabolic health and reduce American suffering and costs, but they're not. They are definitely silent about metabolic dysfunction and its known causes. It's not an overstatement to say that I learned virtually nothing at Stanford Medical School about the tens of thousands of scientific papers that elucidate these root causes of why American health is plummeting and how environmental factors are causing it. For instance, in medical school, I did not learn that for each additional serving of ultra-proliferation,

processed food we eat, early mortality increases by 18%. This now makes up 67% of the foods our kids are eating. I took zero nutrition courses in medical school. I didn't learn that 82% of independently funded studies show harm from processed food, while 93% of industry-sponsored studies reflect no harm. In medical school, I didn't learn that 95% of the people who created the recent USDA food guys. guidelines for America had significant complies of interest with the food industry. I did not learn that one billion pounds of synthetic pesticides are being sprayed on our food every single year. Ninety-nine percent of the farmland in the United States is sprayed with synthetic pesticides, many from China and Germany. And these invisible, tasteless chemicals are strongly linked to autism, ADHD, sex hormone disruption, thyroid disease, sperm dysfunction,

Alzheimer's dementia, birth defects, cancer, obesity, liver dysfunction, liver dysfunction, female infertility, and more, all by hurting our metabolic health. I did not learn that the 8 billion tons of plastic that had been produced just in the last 100 years, pasta was only invented about 100 years ago, are being broken down into microplastics that are now filling our food, our water, and we are now even inhaling them in our air. and that very recent research from just the past Gala months tells us that now about 0.5% of our brains by weight are now plastic. I didn't learn that there are more than 80,000 toxins that have entered our food, water, air, and homes by industry, many of which are banned in Europe. And they are known to alter our gene expression, alter our microbiome composition, and the lining of our gut, and disrupt our hormones.

I didn't learn that heavy metals, like aluminum and lead are present in our food, our baby formula, personal care products, our soil, and many of the mandated medications like vaccines, and that these metals are neurotoxic and inflammatory. I didn't learn that the average American walks of paltry 3,500 steps per day, even though we know, based on science and top journals, that simply walking 7,000 steps today, slashes by 40 to 60 percent are risk of Alzheimer's dementia, tied to diabetes, cancer, and obesity. I certainly did not learn that medical error and medications are the third leading cause of death in the United States. I didn't learn that just five nights of sleep deprivation can induce full-blown prediabetes. I learned nothing about sleep, and we're getting about 20% less sleep on average than were 100 years ago.

I didn't learn that American children are getting less time outdoors now than a maximum security prisoner. And on average, adults spend 93% of their time indoors, even though we know from the science that separation from sunlight destroys our circadian biology, and circadian biology dictates our cellulobiology. I didn't learn that professional organizations that we get our practice guideline from, like the American Diabetes Association and American Account of Pediatrics have taken tens of million dollars from Coke, Cadbury, processed food companies, and vaccine manufacturers like

Mederna. I didn't learn that if we address these root causes that all lead to metabolic dysfunction and help patients change their food and lifestyle patterns with united, strong voice, we could reverse the chronic disease crisis in America, save millions of lives and trillions of dollars in health care costs per year. Instead, doctors are learning that the body is 100 separate parts, and we learn how to drug, we learn how to cut, and we learn how to bill. I'll close by saying that what we are dealing with here is so much more than a physical

health crisis. This is a spiritual crisis. We are choosing. death over light. We are choosing death over life. We are choosing darkness over light for people and the planet, which are inextricably linked. We are choosing to erroneously believe that we are separate from nature and that we can continue to poison nature and then outsmart it. Our path out will be a renewed respect for the miracle of life and a renewed respect for nature. We can restore health to Americans rapidly with smart policy and courageous leadership.

We need a return to courage. We need a return to common sense and intuition. We need a return to awe for the sheer miraculousness of our lives. We need all hands on deck. Thank you. We're not letting you off that easy. I've got a couple questions. So you outlined some basic facts that doctors should know that truthfully you could cover in one hour of an introductory class in medical school. So why aren't we teaching doctors these things? things. Oh, is it on? Yeah.

The easy thing to say would be, you know, follow the money. That sounds sort of trite. But frankly, I think that is the truth, but not in the way you might think that, like, doctors are out to make money or even medical schools. The money and the core incentive problem, which is that every institution that touches our health in America, from medical schools to pharmaceutical companies, to health insurance companies to hospitals, doctors offices. They make more money when we are sick and less when we are healthy. That simple one incentive problem corrods every aspect of the way medicine is thought about,

the way we think about the body. We talked about interconnectedness. It creates a system in which we silo the body into all these separate parts and create that illusion that we all buy into because it's profitable to send people to separate specialties. So it corrods even the foundational conception of how we think about the body. So it is about incentives and money, but I would say that's the invisible hand. It's not necessarily affecting each doctor's clinical practice

of the decision-making. It's corroding every lever of the basics of how we even consider what the human body is. and what life is. In your book, you do a really good job of describing how, because of the specialization of medicine, you don't see the forest for the trees. The fact is, you do need specialized medicine. I mean, doctors can't know at all.

So I think the question is, how do we get back to the reward for general practitioners that do focus on what you're writing about? Yeah. I have huge respect for doctors, and I am incredibly grateful for. the American healthcare system, which has produced miracles, and we absolutely need to continue to have primary care doctors and specialists, and they should be rewarded highly. However, if we focused on what everyone here is talking about, I think we'd have 90% less throughput through our health care system. We would be able to have these doctors probably

have a much better life, to be honest, because right now doctors are working 100 hours a week, seeing 50, 60, 70 patients, and could actually have more time. with patients who develop these acute issues that need to be treated by a doctor. But so many of the things in the specialist office are chronic conditions that we know are fundamentally rooted in the cellular dysfunction I describe, which is metabolic dysfunction, which is created by our lifestyle. So I think that there's always going to be a place for specialists, but so much fewer, and I think if we had a different conception for the body as interconnected, they would also interact with each other

in a very different way, a much more collaborative way. And then, of course, we need to incentivize doctors in the health care system towards outcomes, not throughput. My hope is, you know, through people like you and your book that doctors who take that holistic approach, they'll be specialists themselves. And more people will demand that's the kind of medical care I want. I think that's the latest gets solved. Our next presenter is Dr. Chris Palmer. Dr. Palmer is a Harvard-trained psychiatrist, research, and author of,

the brain energy, where he explores a groundbreaking connection between metabolic health and mental illness. He is a leader in innovative approaches to treating psychiatric conditions, advocating for the use of diet and metabolic interventions to improve mental health outcomes. Dr. Palmer's work is reshaping how the medical field views and treats mental health disorders. Dr. Palmer. Thank you. Senator Johnson, Mr. Kennedy, and distinguished guests, it's really an honor to be here. I want to build on what Dr. Means just shared, that these chronic diseases we face today, obesity, diabetes, fatty liver all share something in common. They are, in fact, metabolic dysfunction. I'm going to go into a little bit of the science just to make sure we're all on the same page. Although most people think of metabolism as burning calories, it is far more than that. Metabolism is a series of chemical reactions that convert food into energy and building blocks essential for cellular health.

When we have metabolic dysfunction, it can drive numerous chronic diseases, which is a paradigm shift in the medical field. Now, there is no doubt. Metabolism is complicated. It really is. It is influenced by biological, psychological, environmental, and social factors. And the medical field says this complexity, is the reason we can't solve the obesity epidemic. Because they're still trying to understand every molecular detail of biology. But in fact, we don't need to understand biology in order to understand the cause.

The cause is coming from our environment, a toxic environment like poor diet and exposure to harmful chemicals, and these are actually quite easy to study, understand, and address. There is no doubt food plays a key role. It provides the substrate for energy and building blocks. Nutricious food support metabolism, while ultra-processed options can disrupt it.

It is shocking. that today in 2024, the FDA allows food manufacturers to introduce brand new chemicals into our food supply without adequate testing. The manufacturers are allowed to determine for themselves whether this substance is safe for you and your family to eat or not. metabolism's impact goes beyond physical health. I am a psychiatrist, some of you are probably wondering, why are you here? It also affects mental health. Because guess what?

The human brain is an organ too. And when brain metabolism is impaired, it can cause symptoms that we call mental illness. It is no coincidence that as the rates of obesity and diabetes are skyrocketing, so too are the rates of mental illness. In case you didn't know, we have a mental health crisis. We have all-time prevalence highs for depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, deaths of despair, drug overdoses, ADHD, and autism. What does the mental health field have to say for this? Well, you know, mental illness is just chemical imbalances or maybe trauma and stress.

That is wholly insufficient to explain the epidemic that we are seeing. And in fact, there is a better way to integrate the biopsychosocial factors known to play a role in mental illness. mental disorders at their core are often metabolic disorders impacting the brain. It's not surprising to most people that obesity and diabetes might play a role in depression or anxiety, but the rates of autism have quadrupled in just 20 years, and the rates of ADHD have tripled over that same period of time. These are neurodevelopmental disorders. and many people are struggling to understand how on earth could they rise so rapidly.

But it turns out that metabolism plays a profound role in neurodevelopment. And sure enough, parents with metabolic issues like obesity and diabetes are more likely to have children with autism and ADHD. This is not about fat shaming. because what I am arguing is that the same foods and chemicals and other drivers of obesity that are causing obesity and the parents are affecting the brain health of our children. There is compelling evidence that food plays a direct role in mental health. One study of nearly 300,000 people found that those who eat ultra-processed foods daily are three times more likely to struggle with their mental health,

than people who never or rarely consume them. A systematic review found direct associations between ultra-processed food, exposure, and 32 different health parameters, including mental health conditions. Now, I'm not here to say that food is the only or even primary driver of mental illness. Let's go back to something familiar.

trauma and stress do drive mental illness. But for those of you who don't know, trauma and stress are also associated with increased rates of obesity and diabetes. Trauma and stress change human metabolism. We need to put the science together. This brings me to a key point. We cannot separate physical and mental health from mental health from mental. metabolic health. Addressing metabolic dysfunction has the potential to prevent and treat a wide

range of chronic diseases. This is not just theoretical. We've just heard from Michaela Peterson-Fuller, Dr. Peterson. In my own work, I have seen firsthand how using metabolic therapies like the ketogenic diet and other dietary interventions, can improve even severe mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, sometimes putting them into lasting remission. These reports are published in peer-reviewed, prestigious medical journals. However, there is a larger issue at play that many have talked about. Medical education and public health recommendations are really, captured by industry and politics, and at best, they often rely on weak epidemiological data,

resulting in conflicting or even harmful advice. We heard a reference to this, but in case you didn't know a long time ago, we demonized saturated fat. And what was the consequence of demonizing saturated fat. We replaced it with healthy vegetable shortening. That was the phrase we used, healthy vegetable shortening. Guess what was in that healthy vegetable shortening? It was filled with trans fats, which are now recognized to be so harmful that they've been banned in the United states. Let's not repeat mistakes like this. So what's the problem? Number one, nutrition and mental health research are severely underfunded, with each of them getting less than 5% of the NIH budget. This is no accident. This is the concerted effort of lobbying by industry, food manufacturers,

the health care industry. They do not want root causes discovered. We need to get back to funding research on the root causes of mental and metabolic disorders, including the effects of foods, chemicals, medications, environmental toxins on the human brain and metabolism. We stand here at a crossroads. We can continue managing symptoms and watching this crisis worsen. we can choose a new path, one that addresses the root causes of mental and metabolic disorders.

The time to act is now, for the sake of our citizens, our children, and our nation's future. Let's work together to address this chronic disease epidemic. I want to start by making a comment on the mention that Dr. McCarray, I did about the Pima Indians. I spent about 20% of my career working on issues for Native Americans, indigenous people in Canada and Latin America. And the Pima example is a really good example.

On the reservations today, which suffered more than any other population, and the highest COVID deaths rates in our country, suffered from chronic disease more than any other population. And it's common to call to characterize as white death, white sugar, white flour, and white Crisco oil, which is committing, is ending the genocide of the Native Americans in this country. It's the completion of that genocide. The Pima Indians are actually a perfect natural experiment because on the Mexican side of the border,

they're not getting those, and the Pimas, they are a long-lived. They're slim. They don't have diabetes and on our side 90% of them are obese, very short-lived. I think that longevity is something like 47 years, although I have to check that, but very, very close to that. And it's a natural experiment that shows the danger of ultra-processed foods. Dr. Palmer, the mitochondrial disorder affects every organ of the body. and the brain is an organ of the body. But the brain actually has a lot more difficult

job of excreting these kind of toxins than the other organs. Can you talk about that and also talk about the fact that about 0.5% in recent studies of the American brains are now made up microplastics. So 5.5% of the weight of our brains are now microplastics and that's something we should all be worried about. Yeah, so thank you for the question. The issue of microplastics and nanoplastics in the human body is actually, sadly, in its infancy. We have two publications out in the last couple of months demonstrating that microplastics,

are in fact found in the human brain. And as Dr. Means said, and you cited, 0.5% of the brain's weight appears to be composed of microplastics. We need more research to better understand whether these microplastics are, in fact, associated with harmful conditions, because microplastics are now ubiquitous. So some will argue, well, they're everywhere and everybody's got them, and it's just a benign thing. Some will argue that.

The most compelling evidence against that is a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine a few months ago now, in which they were doing routine carotid endarderectomies, taking plaque out of people's carotid arteries, just routinely doing that for clinical care. and then they analyzed those plaques for microplastics. 58% of the people had detectable microplastics in the plaques. So they compared this 58% group who had microplastics to the ones who didn't, followed them for three years, just three years. And the ones who had microplastics had four times the mortality.

There is strong reason to believe based on animal data, and based on cell biology data, that microplastics are in fact toxic to the human body, to mitochondrial function, to hormone dysregulation and all sorts of things. There are lots of reasons to believe that. But the scientists will say we need more research. We need to better understand whether these microplastics really are associated with higher rates of disease, I think people are terrified of the answer. People are terrified of the answer. And if you think about everything that you consume and how much of it is not wrapped in plastic,

all of those industries are going to oppose research, they are going to oppose research funding to figure this out ASAP. because that will be a monumental change to not just the food industry, but our entire economy, imagining just cleaning up the oceans and trying to get this plastic, and then more importantly, trying to figure out how are we going to detox humans? How are we going to de-plasticize human beings? How are we going to get these things out? It is an enormous problem, but the reality is putting our heads in the sand is not going to help.

And I am really hopeful that by raising issues and letting people know about this health crisis, that maybe we will get answers quickly. You mentioned that people are afraid to find the answer. You also mentioned an issue of which we're not supposed to even ask questions because people are afraid of the answer. And that was autism. And while we have another psychologist at the table with Dr. Peterson, I'd like you to just, I guess, speculate on why is it, why, I understand why industry probably doesn't want to find the root cause of autism, but why don't our federal health agencies seem to have any curiosity whatsoever

of trying to find, you know, this is, again, I don't know the exact stats, it's kind of hard to find the one 10,000 or everybody, you know, we know now, one in 36, children in America, one in 22 in California. I mean, I can't imagine being a parent of a severely autistic person, okay? I certainly wouldn't want to be somebody manufacturing vaccines and all of a sudden finding out that, boy, they may be contributing. But just, I mean, I see Del Bigtree here who's done so much fabulous work and trying to raise public awareness. But I'll go back to your afraid to find the answer. Can you just talk about that? Dr. Peterson, I'd like to hear your thoughts on that as well.

You know, your question is, why are our health agencies not exploring these questions? It's because the health agencies are largely influenced by the industries they are supposed to be regulating and looking out for the medical education community. is largely controlled by pharmaceutical companies. $1.5 billion goes to support, $1.5 billion every year goes to support physician education. That's from pharmaceutical companies, 1.5 billion from pharmaceutical companies.

So physicians are getting educated with some influence, large influence, I would argue, by them. The health organizations, it's a political issue. The NIH, it's politics. Politicians are selecting people to be on the committees or people to oversee these organizations. Politicians rely on donations from companies and supporters to get reelected.

And the reality is this is not going to be easy to tackle. the challenge is that you'll get ethical politicians who say, I'm not going to take any of that money, and I'm going to try to do the right thing. And right now, the way the system is set up, there's a good chance those politicians won't get reelected. And instead, their opponents who were more than happy to take millions of dollars in campaign contributions

will get reelected, and then they will return the favor to their... noble campaign donors. We are at a crossroads. We have to decide who are the constituents of the American government. Is it industry or is it the American people? So Dr. Peterson, I mean, first of all, do you agree with the premise of the question based on what Dr. Palmer said that we're just afraid to find the answer? Do you agree with that?

if so, why? Well, someone has to decide which of the infinite number of facts scientists might concentrate on. And exactly how that process of facilitating hypothesis generation and inquiry occurs isn't exactly known. Why do scientists study what they study? Well, some of it is what they're interested in. Some of it is what bothers their conscience and a fair bit of it is what would you say what is provided to the scientific community as

direction from let's say policy makers and the community and so what one of the things we're trying to do here in the broadest possible sense which is why I opened my remarks with a more broad reference to philosophy of science as well someone has to establish the aims You know, you saw American science tilt in the stem direction remarkably in the 1960s when the moon was the aim, for example, right? When we were concerned about Russian domination of the technical enterprise. The political field and the cultural field set the stage that defines the targets of inquiry, especially for the incremental scientists who are mostly chasing. research funding, for example. So it's up to the political leaders

to determine what the priorities are. That's the diagnostic issue that I was referring to. Like, what are the problems here? And that's a hard thing, right? If I had to say to you, what are the five most significant problems that beset the United States currently? That's a very difficult question to answer,

but it has to be done at the level of political leadership. It is, but within health, I think it's pretty simple. proposition to say that, you know, this rise in autism is a serious problem that ought to be looked at, and we don't. Again, it's off limits. You can't even ask the question. It's just like, oh, it just happened. But anyway, I think we do have to move on here. The next presenter, we're going a little out of order again, but Callie means, Casey's brother was, again, the catalyst for this, and Callie has been the person who put this amazing panel together and got all these folks traveled here to Washington, D.C.,

and got him to write their statements. Callie will also be doing a wrap-up on this thing, but I thought right now, as we kind of move into the nitty-gritty of, you know, what it's actually happening with the industry, and I thought we'd have him speak at this point in time. So Callie Means is the co-founder of TrueMed, a company that enables tax-free spending on food and exercise. He recently started an advocacy coalition with leadership,

health and wellness companies called end chronic disease. Early in his career, he was a consultant for food and pharma companies and is now exposing practices. They used to weaponize our institutions of trust, and he's doing a great job doing interviews with his sister Casey. Thank you, Senator. When thinking and talking about health care early on, I would often make the lazy statement that, well, there's problems, but life expects he has doubled. And I hear that. I hear that at meeting with frankly senators, members of Congress today. That's something we often go to. Well, our system's okay. As Peter Tia pointed out in his book, and this is so crucial, if you remove advancements from infectious and acute conditions, life expectancy has not increased in the past

hundred years. We spend 90 to 95 percent of all medical spending on chronic issues, and it's done nothing. If you think about a medical miracle, it's almost certainly a solution that was invented before 1960 for an acute condition. Emergency surgical procedures to ensure a complicated childbirth wasn't a death sense. Sanitation procedures, antibiotics, the insured infection was an inconvenience, not deadly. Eradicating polio, regular waste management procedures that helped control outbreaks like the bubonic plague, sewage systems that replaced the cesspool. and open drains prevent the human waste from contaminating the water. The U.S. health system is a miracle in solving acute conditions that will kill us right away.

But economically acute conditions aren't great in our modern system because the patient is quickly cured and is no longer a customer. Starting in 1960s, the medical system took the trust engendered by these acute innovations like antibiotics, which were credited with winning World War II. and they use that trust to ask patients not to question its authority on chronic diseases, which can last a lifetime and are more profitable. But the medicalization of chronic disease in the past 50 years has been an abject failure. Today we're in a siloed system where there's a treatment for everything,

and let's just look at the stats. As heart disease has gone up, excuse me, heart disease has gone up as more statins are prescribed. Type 2 diabetes has gone up as more metformin is prescribed. ADHD has gone up as more Adderall is prescribed. Depression and suicide has gone up as more SSRs are prescribed. Pain has gone up as more opioids are prescribed. Cancer has gone up as we've spent more on cancer.

And now J.P. Morgan, literally at the conference in San Francisco recently, they put up a graph and they showed as more ozimic is projected to be prescribed over the next 10 years, obesity rates are going to go up as more as is prescribed. Explain that to me. It was clapping. All the bankers were clapping like seals at this graphic. Our intervention-based system is by design. In the early 1900s, John Deereo O'Ockyfell are using that he could use byproducts from oil

production to create pharmaceuticals, heavily funded medical schools throughout the United States to teach a curriculum based on the intervention first model of Dr. William Stewart-Hawsted, the founding physician of Johns Hopkins who created the residency-based model that viewed invasive surgical procedures and medication as the highest echelon of medicine. An employee of Rockefellers was tasked to create the Flexner Report, which outlined a vision for medical education that prioritized interventions and stigmatized nutritional and holistic remedies. Congress affirmed the Flexner report in 1910 to establish that any credentialed medical institution in the United States, United States had to follow the Halstead Rockefeller intervention-based model that silos disease

and to downplay viewing the body as an interconnected system. It later came out that Dr. Hallstead's cocaine and morphine addiction fueled his day-long surgical residences and most of the medical logic underlying the flexion report was wrong, but that hasn't prevented the report and the Halstead Rockefeller engine vates brand of medicine from being the foundational document that Congress uses to regulate medical education today. This is a game. We are getting sick. Nine out of 10 killers of Americans, 90% of medical costs are from a weaponized food system. It's not that complicated. When I say weaponized, I mean that literally. Our processed food industry was created by the cigarette industry. In the

1980s, after decades of inaction, the Surgeon General and the U.S. government finally, finally said that smoking might be harmful, and smoking rates plummeted. We listened to doctors in this country. We listen to medical leadership. And as smoking rates plummeted, cigarette companies with their big balance sheets, strategically bought up food companies. And by 1990, the two largest food companies in the world were Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds, two cigarette companies. These cigarette companies moved two departments over from the cigarette department to the food department. They moved the scientists. Cigarette companies were the highest payers of scientists, one of the biggest employers of scientists to make the cigarettes addictive. They moved these addiction specialists,

world leading addiction specialists, to the food department by the thousands. And those scientists weaponize our ultra-processed food. That is the problem with ultra-processed food. You have the best scientists in the world creating this food to be palatable and to be addictive. They then moved their lobbyists over. They used the same playbook, and their lobbyists co-opted the USDA and created the food pyramid. The food pyramid was a document created by the cigarette industry through complete corporate capture and was an ultra-processed food marketing document saying that we needed to of carbs and sugar. And we listen to medical experts in this country. The American people, American parents, many parents who had kids in the 90s, thought it was a good thing to do

to give their kids a bunch of ultra-processed food. And carb consumption went up 20% in the American diet in the next 10 years. The devil's bargain comes in that this ultra-processed food consumption has been one of the most profitable dynamics in American history for the healthcare industry as we've all just been decimated with chronic conditions. The medical industry hasn't not only, they haven't not only been silent on this issue, they've actually been complicit. Working for the food industry, I help funnel money from Coca-Cola to the American Diabetes Association. The truth is we need to listen to the medical system if you have an acute issue like a leg-threatened infection or broken bone, but when it comes to the chronic conditions that

are plaguing our lives, we should distrust almost every institution regarding nutrition or chronic disease advice. As the panelists have described, we are in an existential moment, especially when it comes to the chronic conditions that make up 90% of medical costs. There's a slur about the American patient. Casey, one of her first days at Stanford Medical School, was told that the American patient wants to be sedentary,

wants to eat ultra-processed food, that the best the medical system to do is stand with a scalpel and stand with a prescription pad and clean up the mess. Americans do not want to be sick. I don't believe it. It's the trillions of dollars of incentives that are in the way, and we must urgently remove corruption from the USDA, the CDC, the NIH, and our other medical institutions, and get appropriate medical guidelines.

We must renounce the Flexner Report and prioritize root cause interventions and systems thinking to reverse the chronic disease crisis. Senator Johnson, thank you so much for convening this conversation. Thank you, Callie. You probably didn't notice it, but there are an awful lot of heads shaking up and down as you were making your comments. We'll come back to you to wrap things up. Next, we're going to go to Max.

Max Lugavere. Lugavere, yes. Lugavere, okay, sorry. I'm generally bad about 500. That's about it. Is a leading health and wellness advocate, filmmaker in New York Times, best-selling author of Genius Foods.

His work focuses on the link between diet, lifestyle, and brain health, and he has become a trusted voice in educating people about how nutrition impacts cognitive function. Max. Thank you so much, ladies and gentlemen. gentlemen, Johnson, thank you for having me here today to speak on one of the most pressing public

health issues of our time, nutrition. Our food environment is killing us, and it's doing so slowly over the course of decades. And if we don't change course, future generations will suffer even more. Today's 73% of the modern supermarket is made up of ultra-processed foods, foods that barely resemble what we've evolved to eat. 60% of the calories Americans consume are from these types of products. Certain demographics are hit harder than others. For example, black Americans consume on average 80% of their calories from ultra-processed foods, contributing to a disproportionate burden of diet-related diseases.

This isn't by accident. Many such populations are specifically targeted by advertisers. But make no mistake, all Americans are under attack and it's costing us dearly. A recent umbrella review of meta-analyses linked ultra-processed foods to 32 negative health outcomes, everything from cancer, heart disease, and diabetes, the usual suspects, to depression and anxiety, as Dr. Palmer has alluded to. Not one single positive health outcome was associated. with these foods, not one.

Ultra-processed foods, the kinds of foods that typically line our supermarket aisles, are engineered to be hyper-palatable and addictive. In fact, according to a study published by Gearhard at all in 2022, ultra-processed foods meet the exact same criteria for addictive substances as tobacco products. Seminole NIH-funded research clearly shows their obisogenic effect. They drive us to overeathing. by as much as 800 calories per day, simply due to the quality of the food. This finding was actually precisely replicated and published last week in Japan.

This is why America is facing an obesity epidemic. That's not about willpower. It's about the food system. And yet, the most recent dietary guidelines advisory committee appeared to bury their head in the sand, claiming that there is limited evidence that ultra-processed food intake increases risk for obesity in adults. We now know that every 10% increase in the proportion of ultra-processed foods in the diet is associated with a 14% increased risk of all-caused death and a 25% higher risk of Alzheimer's

disease, a cause that's near and dear to my heart as my own mother suffered from dementia for years before passing due to pancreatic cancer. I've seen profound sickness up close and personal, and it's motivated me to dedicate my life to this fight. But ultra-processed foods aren't just driving weight gain and subsequent metabolic dysfunction. Ultra-processed foods are exposing us to dangers that are invisible to the naked eye, forever chemicals, pesticide residues, and endocrine disruptors. You won't find microplastics on the ingredients list of any item in your cupboard, but they're there too, harming everything from our fertility to our cardiovascular health, an increasing risk of heart attack,

stroke, and death, new research published in the New England Journal of Medicine has shown. Our bodies are capable and resilient, but today the toxic burden is simply too high. These compounds are laced into the very food-like products that line our grocery store shelves, and yet they remain under-discussed in public health conversations. In fact, legitimately concerned families are gaslit, again and again. reminded that, quote, everything is a chemical. It's insulting to American families like mine who have seen real sickness. All this adds up to the fact that today, we are not simply living longer, we are dying longer.

Chronic diseases are becoming more prevalent, and we're living out our final decades plagued by illnesses that are largely preventable with the right interventions. But here's the problem. A fraction of the money spent on chronic disease goes to the same. towards the research and promotion of these interventions. For brain disease specifically, my passion, prevention accounts for only two cents of every research dollar spent. Think about that for a moment. The majority of our resources are being funneled into treatment

while we're barely investing in stopping these diseases before they start. It's a short-sighted approach to one of the greatest public health challenges of our time. Prevention isn't just an option, it's the only option, it's the only solution. In what seems like a coordinated effort between the food industry and the upper echelons of academia and nutrition science, the dangers of ultra-processed foods continue to be suppressed, while the fear-mongering of nutrient-dense, whole foods, such as

red meat and eggs, continues. Even Harvard recently published a study correlating red meat consumption to type 2 diabetes. No legitimate researcher believes that unprocessed red meat consumption, which has declined over past decades while type 2 diabetes rates soar, is causally related to type 2 diabetes. This misinformation campaign is one of the greatest public health scandals of our time. If we don't change the narrative, we're going to continue to see an escalation in chronic diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and metabolic disorders. that are crippling our health care system. We need to shift the paradigm from treatment to prevention.

That means educating the public on the dangers of ultra-processed foods, incentivizing the production and consumption of whole minimally processed foods of both plant and animal origin, and putting pressure on the food industry to improve or remove these toxic products from our shelves. And let's invest in the promotion of evidence-based diet and lifestyle interventions for chronic diseases, because, as we've learned, genetics play all of our shelves. only a small role. What we eat matters. If we act now, we can avert the collapse of our health care system under the weight of preventable diseases. But if we continue down this path,

the cost will be staggering. And not just in terms of dollars, but in human lives. The food we eat is either the safest form of medicine or the slowest form of poison. I'll end with a question. If your grocery store has a health food section, what does that make the rest of the the store. Thank you. Good, good question, Max. So I also had a sneak peek at a new documentary by Asimahultra called First Do Know Farm.

We're going to actually be showing that in Wednesday night at the Capitol Center. But in there, they talked about a Nova scale. Are you aware of this? Yeah, it's a divided in Latin America where Nova 1 was an apple, Nova 2 was apple slices, Nova 3 is

apple sauce, and then Nova 4 of McDonald's pie. Ultra-processed food. Does that kind of scale? Do you think that's helpful? Is that pretty valid? I mean, what's your opinion? How best to...

You talk about ultra-processed food. I mean, what's the best way for consumers to really evaluate this? We've gone to organic, by the way, because of Dr. Casey. And you find all these organic foods, but they all have then seed oils. Yeah.

So, I mean, kind of tell us a little bit how does the consumer navigate this? Well, the lines are fairly blur. you're right and processing is a continuum and there's nothing inherently wrong with processing a food when you slice an apple as you alluded to you're processing that apple to some degree. Ultra processed foods are defined essentially as a food that you couldn't possibly make in your own kitchen if you tried. It's a food product with innumerable ingredients which doesn't necessarily demonize a food but it's a fairly good surrogate indicator for what a processed food might look like a food that has innumerable

ingredients, half of which you can identify or even pronounce. So I think that's a fairly good litmus test. But it's also important to understand that even within the bucket of ultra-processed food, some are better than others, and we need to continue to do research to understand which are the most nefarious from a health standpoint. I think it's fairly well-agreed, well-established at this point that sugar-sweetened beverages are among the worst offenders. They provide no satiety benefit, pure calories, artificial colorants, and the like. And there are certainly some ultra-procrast processed foods that are likely more benign. But in general, as a general screening tool, if you will, an ultra-processed food is generally a food that you couldn't possibly replicate in your own kitchen if you try.

I've also heard just comments like don't drink your sugar. Eat what your grandparents ate. You're pretty solid ground from that standpoint. Senator, I just wanted to quickly mention working for the food companies in the past two years, there's been 50,000. nutrition studies created. And I can tell you nutrition research is ultra-processed food marketing documentation. You know, there's not a big lobby for the broccoli or regenerative beef. And I think we've been divorced from our common sense of these questions. We are the only animals that have chronic rates of obesity and metabolic dysfunction. We're born with an innate sense with whole food of what to eat. You can't overeat broccoli or steak. And I think the key thing with these, you know,

I think the industry wants us to get to debate about which ingredients good, which ingredients bad. These science experiments are designed to hijack our evolutionary biology. And I think we could replace all nutrition guidance with a deprioritization of ultra-processed food and be in a much, much better place. I would truly recommend firing almost every single nutrition advisor in the U.S. government and replacing it with very simple guidelines. I would say it depends on how good the steak is. For people who might be looking at this hearing and who are learning things and they're

a surprise, what I've always said and what I've done myself over probably the past decade is to just not eat anything that comes in a package. And would you say that was good advice? Yeah, I think that's great advice. And in an ideal world, we'd be able to adhere to that ideal. I think it's important to understand how to read a nutrition label and to gain a sense of health literacy today. I think many people are still shocked at the connection

between what they eat and their health outcomes, but as a general proxy, yeah, I think it's best to steer, it's best to shop around the perimeter of the supermarket. Most people don't realize this, but supermarkets are designed the same way. It's the aisles that contain all the ultra-processed foods typically. It's not to say that there's not good stuff in those aisles, extra virgin olive oil, nuts seeds, things like that.

But the more you can keep your shopping cart tethered to the perimeter of the supermarket, the better off you'll be. You know, I really do want to discuss when we get down the presentations how can consumers contend with this? We don't all live in

California where they have farmers markets all the time. And again, my belief, my hope is that consumer demand will drive greater availability. Let's move through there. but I really want to discuss that because that's people want to know how can how can I live this way how can I live healthier How can I obtain these things? One thing they can do is tell their member of Congress to stand up to pharma and adjust our incentives That's very important. I feel very

You know, it's very tough for lower-income Americans who are being drugged with our food stamp and snap programs that go 70% to ultra-processed food and then Medicaid a completely rigged program that jumps right into profit from their sickness so we we do need top-down change and we need to be we need to make this an issue with our members next by the way i would definitely vote for those types of reforms to the SNAP program absolutely healthier food uh next presenter will be brigham bueller uh bringham is the founder and CEO of ways too well a health care that provides personalized preventive care through telemedicine with a strong background in the pharmaceutical industry bueler has brigham is focused on making health care more accessible by

harnessing the power of technology, deliver effective, and tailored treatments. His vision for improving health outcomes has positioned him as a leader in modern patient-centered health care solutions. Brigham. Thank you for the introduction. I'll start with this. I have heard so many times the health care system's broke. The health care system's broke.

And I want to be clear as day. The health care system's not broke. It's rigged. And we're the ones fitting the bill. if we look at what's happening in this country and we look at the chronic disease crisis that we're facing and you peel back the layers to the onion, you realize that the cost is much more than the dollars and cents. And we could get into the dollars and cents. I could tell you that health care is the number one budgetary concern for the federal government at 25%. It's in the top. It's the number one budgetary concern

for most states is the number one reason for bankruptcy in our nation for individuals. But the costs are much more dire than that. They're paid in human lives, loved ones, friends, and family. As the brother of a victim to the opioid crisis, the son to a victim of the diabetes crisis, and a sibling to a victim of the mental health crisis, I can tell you that the stakes are not only real, but they're personal. And I would implore you next time you have the privilege of having dinner with your family, look around the table and ask yourselves, when you look into their eyes,

what you would give to have another year with that family member, another month of health and happiness and joy and memories and moments, because that was something that was taken from my family during the opioid crisis. This is not a Republican issue. This is not a Democrat issue. This is a humanity issue. If we really truly want to address the chronic disease crisis in this country, we have to start by preventing these diseases from occurring in the first place.

In medicine, we often say that to properly treat or prevent a chronic disease, we must first understand the root cause of that disease. I believe the same principle applies to business and politics. To truly grasp what is driving chronic disease epidemic, we must understand the root cause of the crisis. There is a cancer in our health care system, and it is insidious and spreading rapidly. That cancer is big industry, a broken system fueled by corruption and collusion. We cannot treat what we refuse to diagnose. I have personally witnessed physicians unable to run necessary lab tests, unable to prescribe appropriate medications,

unable to even perform investigations into their patients' conditions to uncover their root cause. We hear people reference President Eisenhower's speech all the time about the military industrial complex, but rarely do we hear the second half of that speech. He also warned us about the rise of the scientific industrial complex. He warned us if we allow the elite to control the scientific research, it could have dire consequences. The statistics and the data that we are presenting, today illustrate that very nightmare. How is it that Americans are so chronically ill despite spending more on health care than any other nation? The answer is simple. Private industry has traded

patient outcomes and public health for quarterly profits and earnings. Private interest now dominates academia, scientific research, the governing and regulatory bodies. As a result, the focus has shifted away from patient care to corporate gain. What I asked this group, of individuals today is to take off the blinders and look deeper into ourselves, into our institutions, because we have a real opportunity to affect meaningful change. The data and statistics that everyone's going to share today may feel overwhelming and at times hopeless. But I want to share with everyone one final statistic. 400 trillion to one. Four hundred trillion to one are the odds that we're here today and alive. What are we going to do with it? The time to

act is now. That's it. Thank you, Brigh, I'm going to call an audible here as moderator. I saw that hopefully the future chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Senator Mike Craper from Idaho came into the room. I asked Mike to share his story. He used to wear larger suits, let's put it that way. But he went down the path of Ketogenic. ketogenic diet, I believe. But Mike, why don't you just kind of tell your story? And by the way, he's somebody you want to influence. Chairman of Senate Finance, I mean, Senate Finance can be makes an awful lot of decisions on Medicare, Medicaid, a lot of things we

talked about with the OZMPIC now, the lobbying group try and make that available. And how harmful, I think most people in this room think that might be. So, you know, Senator Crepe, if you could just kind of tell us your story in terms of your diet change and what results you had. Sure. Well, first of all, let me thank you. I didn't come here to say anything. I came here to listen, but I appreciate the opportunity to just have a second to tell you my personal story.

I'll say before I do that, thank you for Ron Johnson. Senator Johnson is also a member of the Finance Committee, and it is my hope that we can get that committee, which I think has the most powerful jurisdiction, particularly over these areas of any in the United States Congress. And so I'm hopeful we can get a focus on addressing the government's part of the role in this to get us back on a better track. I've met some of you. I have listened to more of you. Max, yours is one of the first podcasts and first books that I read when I started this journey. Wow. You probably knew how to pronounce his name properly. What did you say around? I said you probably knew how to prounce his name properly.

Sorry, Max. And I've referenced it to all of my kids and other people I talk to. And the same thing I've listened to Casey and Callie. I listened to your interview on Tucker Carlson. And I think you've done that same interview on about 10 other podcasts. Because when I started searching you, I came across you very regularly, and I intend to listen to more. And there are others here who I've read and seen and been exposed to your materials.

Let me be very quick, and then let's get back to you. I didn't always look like this. In fact, right now, I didn't intend this, but this is the suit that I got married in. And following all of the bad nutritional things that you probably have been talking about here today, I couldn't fit this suit for many years, and it sat in my closet.

And, you know, I had to get into bigger and bigger suits. To make this long story short, I had a friend from years back who told me that just go low carb and you'll be fine and you'll lose weight. And so I just decided to do that. And when I do something, I tend to be very rigid about it. I mean, aggressively, they stick to it. So I was going low carb, but I was basically just doing meat, cheese, and eggs. And that can get really boring, but I did it.

And I lost about 15 pounds in about two or three weeks. and my daughter, who is an ER doc, noticed this, and she said, what are you doing, Dad? And so I said, well, I'm just going low carb. And she said, you know, you may be ought to, and she asked me what I was eating. And she said, those were all good foods, but you maybe ought to look into the keto diet or some of the discussion around that to get a little bit better idea of what a more healthy but similar approach to dieting would be.

So I did. And that's when I got into what I call clean keto, but it was just eating the right oils, the right fats, and there's a right balance with the carbs. And the kinds of carbs that I would eat would be the ones that came in vegetables rather than drinking them, and all of the kind of things

I'm sure you've been talking about here today. And I last 65 pounds in about three months. And that's when I could put this suit back on. And I've been wearing it ever since. That was about six years ago. And I've been sticking to it. I've actually gone to sort of intermittent keto because I was so aggressive at it. I figured I had lost all the fat and I was starting to burn muscle or something else.

So I thought I've got to get kind of a little bit more normal about this. And so now I do all the intermittent fasting and those kinds of things. Now I do intermittent keto, and I stick to it. My blood work got phenomenal, and I'm sticking to following that. And I will just make another advertisement for some of you in here. I got to using a CGM. I've stopped using it because the insurance won't pay for it now, because I'm not on insulin.

And so there's a few things that we need to do to help, you know, who are not independently wealthy and can't just do all the things that they want to do. Get access to some of the tools and mechanisms that we need to access. But I just wanted to tell you, I am immersed in your world right now. I'm so happy you're here delivering this message, and I hope it's listened to all over the halls of Congress, and I hope to do my part when we get a chance to help that happen. Mike, by way, you'll make a fabulous chairman of the finance committee,

me, but Callie Means has a question for you. Senator, thank you so much for that testimonial. And when I hear stories like that, I think everyone around the table has one. It's so inspirational, but it makes me a little angry thinking about lower income kids in this country, how we don't incentivize that path of curiosity. We don't incentivize bio-observability, blood testing. You know, we really, if a kid is sad, they're getting an antidepressant. If they have high cholesterol, they're getting a stat.

If they have high blood sugar, they're getting metformin. And now the American Academy of Pediatrics is pushing for OZMPIC jabs for six-year-olds. And I just think that's enriching. It's breaking our finances as a country, but not spurring them. We could not dictate what Americans should do, but spur that. I just wonder from a finance perspective how much trusting Americans with more flexible spinning accounts, HSAs, whether that's a part of the mix. Oh, it's got to be.

You've got to put the ability back in the hands of people. You know, one piece of it, which I was hoping to hear a lot from and get a lot from you in the future about, is the messaging and how we get people curious about this. I don't think that it's either government's role or that they could do it very well to make people listen. But I do believe that it's part of our role to take incentives out of the way,

to create the right incentives in our governmental programs, and then fund or really allow people to fund their own HSAs or other ways to let people have the ability to purchase and access their own health care out of their own choices. So what I think we can do is get the bad incentives out of the way, create and boost, put on steroids, the new incentive, the right incentives. and, you know, then just continue to be a government that is friendly to people and lets them learn how to take care of their own futures. Thank you. I didn't realize this panel is really going to be an audition for us, future Senate Finance Committee hearing, but hopefully that's the case.

Thank you, Senator. Thanks a lot, Mike. Appreciate that. Let's next go to another testimonial. with Ms. Grace Price. Ms. Price is an 18-year-old citizen scientist and health activists. Grace gained recognition for her documentary cancer of food-borne illness,

which challenged the commonly held belief that cancer is a genetic disease. The main focus of her work is advocating for the health of her generation through exposing the corruption behind big food and pharmaceutical conglomerates. Ms. Price. Thank you so much, Senator. Okay, I want you all to imagine that you're sitting in class taking notes. You realize you have a missed call. It's from your doctor. You listen to the voicemail and learn that you've been diagnosed with colon cancer, stage four colon cancer. What? You're only a

sophomore in college, still trying to figure out how life works and not yet financially stable. And you're now expected to go through treatment for an often terminal disease that most don't get until they're at least in their 60s, right? Hello, everyone. I'm Grace Price, an 18-year-old citizen scientist. If you were wondering why the psychiatrist was on the panel, you're definitely wondering why I'm here. And the answer is the pressing need for someone to speak

about the dire situation of teenagers' health across America. I am no doctor, nor even a college graduate, But maybe it takes someone close enough to the problem to question things others have left untouchable or even worse, they simply accept. As our nation's health declines, we must note that chronic diseases are no longer confined to the elderly. They are now wreaking havoc on my generation. Two, here are some of the disheartening stats that you've already heard, but they're really important, so you're going to hear them again. Early onset cancer is increased by 79% in the past three decades, and obesity is on track to replace smoking as the number one preventable cause of cancer.

That's an interesting one. One in five of us is obese and one in six of us is overweight. 75% of obese children have the vascular age comparable to that of a 45-year-old. 18.7% have non-acoholic fatty liver disease, close to 30% are pre-diabetic, and about one in five adolescents report symptoms of anxiety or depression and one in seven will go on to develop a mental health disorder. Rates of these conditions were close to 0% 50 years ago. Let's keep that in mind, guys. This leads us to ask the question why. Why is Generation Z plagued with more disease than ever when we are the most technologically advanced? And the reason is ultra-processed foods are the new,

cigarette for my generation. However, there is more than just chemical additives, loads of sugar, and preservatives in these foods. Our modern diet was formed by years of corruption within food conglomerates, feuds between nutrition science researchers, and backroom bargains that involved our most trusted health institutions. So let's start at the beginning, the shift to sugar and carbs sustaining our population. According to a medical, analysis in the NIH, the U.S. population consumes, quote, more than 300% of the daily recommended amount of sugar, unquote. But why did we start eating so much sugar? Now let me quote, a 1954 speech from the president of the Sugar Research Foundation, the earliest form of the sugar

industry. Quote, if you put the middle-aged man on a low-fat diet, it takes just five days for the blood cholesterol to get down to where it should be. If the carbohydrate industries were to recapture this 20% of the calories in the U.S. diet, and if sugar maintained its present share of the carbohydrate market, this change would mean an increase in the per capita consumption of sugar more than a third with a tremendous improvement in general health. They spent $5.3 million in 2016 to inform people who had no idea what biochemistry even was that sugar is what sustains our population. They also largely discourage the consumption of animal-based saturated fat, which has sustained humans for a large part of our existence in order to add more sugar and

carbohydrates, which didn't previously exist in excess. Does this mean our modern diets? Was dictated by men in power who had enough money to shift the tides of scientific research towards a mere hypothesis that was in their best interest and to show. done research that contested it. The sugar industry is still having this power. $1.8 million was donated to the American Cancer Society by Coca-Cola to support the ideology that cancer is a genetic disease and not a metabolic one that would coincidentally be impacted by our sugar consumption.

So how has this affected the well-being of our country? Well, now we can brag about having the first generation to be. be raised entirely on fake foods from the minute they were born. Remember how I said our current understanding of food is based on a theory? Well, they did in fact perform an experiment, whether it be intentional or not. On Generation Z. This unethical experiment threatens to steal the futures away from me and my peers. Just look at the difference between sugar consumption of an American adult versus a child. American adults consume 103% more than the recommended amount of sugar per day, whereas the average American child consumes 224% more than the recommended amount.

Adults wonder why we are on pills for depression, ADHD, and obesity, but the answer is glaring at us. Don't take my word for it, just look at the most recent food pyramid that was released. Lucky Charm cereals is ranked higher than ground beef. Coincidentally, 95% of the USDA Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee in 2020 was found of conflict of interest with Big Food and Big Pharma. Prescribing lifelong use of drugs like Ozempic to teens is not the solution. Addressing the corporate capture of our government by big food conglomerates is, We need change now.

For the sake of the future of our nation, please consider my generation. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you, Grace. Can you just describe how difficult is for a teen who I don't imagine you do grocery shopping for the family? So somebody, you know, obviously probably your parents are providing that. How difficult is it for a teen to eat healthy? It's extremely difficult because we are bombarded by the food. industry trying to sell us their products. I mean, Callie mentions this all the time,

and I repeat it, which is that there's nothing more profitable than a child in this country. I mean, why else would the food and beverage industry spend $2 billion per year advertising their ultra-processed foods and sugar-filled drinks to teens? Because they want to make the most money, which makes sense. They're trying to make more profit. And so it's extremely difficult. You wake up and you, first thing you do is consume dessert for breakfast, whether it be in the form of cereal, whether it be orange juice. So you're already getting a glucose spike first thing in the morning. You go to school. Some schools require you consume the lunch that they serve you, which shouldn't even be considered food when you compare it to that of a lunch within France, for example.

And if you don't do that, then you're getting food from the vending machine or you're going to a fast food with your friends. Then after that, you're snacking the minute you get home because the 3 p.m. Slump is real and you have tons of homework to do. So you are again eating ultra-processed foods, candy bars, drinking Coca-Cola, drinking energy drinks filled with sugar and these industrialized oils. And then once it comes to dinner, if you're lucky and your mom still cooks, then you might have some real food. But even then, you don't recognize that this is what you're lucky. You're food should be because of the way that you were raised and that's what we have to realize thank you grace for sharing your perspective I think is it now Vani

Vani Hari known as the food babe is a food activist they wrote that for me that wasn't me that's my not my nickname is it is a food activist author and speaker committed to improving food quality and safety she has built a powerful platform through her blog advocating for transparency and food labeling and the removal of harmful chemicals from processed food. Her activism has spurred significant change in the food industry, encouraging consumers to make healthier, more informed choices while prompting companies to adopt cleaner practices. Bonnie. Thank you so much, Senator Ron Johnson, for this opportunity to testify. It's truly surreal to be in this room right now. I'm here today to share something

important with all of you that affects all of our lives, something that has been overlooked for decades. Our government is letting U.S. food companies get away with serving American citizens harmful ingredients that are banned or heavily regulated in other countries. Even worse, American food companies are selling the same exact products overseas without these chemicals, but choose to continue serving us the most toxic version here. It's un-American. One set of ingredients. Thank you.

One set of ingredients there and one set of ingredients here. Let me give you some examples. Do my honor. Here we go. My Vanna White, everybody. This is McDonald's French fries. I would like to argue that probably nobody in this room is not had a McDonald's French fries, by the way. Nobody raised their hand during the staff meeting earlier

today. In the U.S., there's 11 ingredients. In the U.K., there's three, and salt is optional. An ingredient called Domethyl polysiloxane is an ingredient preserved with formaldehyde, a neurotoxin in the U.S. version. This is used as a foaming agent, so they don't have to replace the oil that often, making McDonald's more money here in the United States. But they Don't do that across the pond. This is Skittles. Notice the long list of ingredient differences. 10 artificial dyes in the US version

and titanium dioxide. This ingredient is banned in Europe because it can cause DNA damage. Artificial dyes are made from petroleum and products containing these dyes require a warning label in Europe that states it may cause adverse and effects on activity in detention and children. And they have been linked to cancer and disdainting and disruptions in the immune system.

This on the screen back here is Gatorade. In the U.S., they use red 40 and caramel color. In Germany, they don't. They use carrot and sweet potatoes to color their Gatorade. This is Doritos. The U.S. version has three different artificial dyes and MSG. The U.K. version does not.

And let's look at cereal. General Mills is definitely playing some tricks on us. They launched a new version of tricks just recently in Australia. It has no dyes. They even advertise that when the U.S. version still does. This is why I became a food activist. My name is Vani Hari, and I only want one thing. I want Americans to be treated the same way as citizens in other countries

by our own American companies. My dad came to America in the 1970s. in America in the 1960s. And when he went back to India to have an arranged marriage to my mom, they came back to the U.S. to live for the rest of their lives on their honeymoon. The first thing my dad said to my mom when they got here

is if we're going to live in America, we're going to eat like Americans, and he introduced her to McDonald's. So that was the start of my mother relying on ultra-processed food to feed her children, like so many mothers do every single day. As a result, I was a child ridden with health issues, and after going through two children,

going through two surgeries on nine prescription drugs, I hit rock bottom in my early 20s. I started to take a hard look into the food I was eating. I learned that over the last 60 years, almost all food additives were being created for one sole purpose to improve the bottom line of the food industry and not improve our health. These chemicals were created to mimic real food, to make it easier and cheaper for food manufacturers to preserve their food, to make it last longer on the shelf, to help manage. manufacturing and sinister of all to allow them to create products that are more addictive in nature. Once I decided to take back control of my health, I eliminated ultra-processed foods from my diet

and started eating real food made without synthetic preservatives and pesticides, growth hormones, chemical additives. I went off every single prescription drug and realized a life I never thought was possible. I had been walking around like a zombie. And because I didn't want anybody else to feel this way, I ended up quitting my lifelong career as a corporate management consultant to investigate and write about food full-time. During my investigations, I found an alarming discovery. We use over 10,000 food additives here in the United States, and in Europe, there's only 400 approved. In 2013, I discovered that Kraft was producing their famous mac and cheese. and other countries without artificial dyes.

They used yellow five and yellow six here. I was so outraged by this unethical practice that I decided to do something about it. I launched a petition asking Kraft to remove artificial dyes from their products here in the United States. And after 400,000 signatures in a trip to their headquarters, Kraft finally announced they would make the change. I also discovered Subway was selling sandwiches

with a chemical called azodicarbonyide in their bread in other countries. It's the same chemical they use in yoga mats and shoe rubber. You know, when you turn a yoga mat sideways and you see the evenly dispersed air bubbles, well, they wanted to do the same thing in bread, so it would be the same exact product. Every time you went to a subway, when the chemical is heated, studies show that it turns into a carcinogen. Not only is this ingredient banned in Europe and Australia, you get fined $450,000 if you caught using it in Singapore. If we were able to get, you know, when this, what's really interesting, is when this chemical is heated,

studies show that it turns into a carcinogen. Not only is this ingredient banned, but we were able to get subway to remove azodicarbonide from their bread in the United States after another successful petition. And as a bonus, there was a ripple effect in almost every bread manufacturer in America followed suit. For years, Starbucks didn't publish their ingredients

for their coffee drinks. It was a mystery until I convinced a barista to show me the ingredients on the back of the bottles they were using to make menu items like their famous pumpkin spice lattes. I found out here in the United States, Starbucks was coloring their PSLs with caramel coloring level four, an ingredient made from ammonia and linked to cancer, but using beta-carotene from carrots to color their drinks in the UK. After publishing an investigation and widespread media attention, Starbucks removed caramel coloring from all of their drinks in America and started publishing the ingredients for their entire menu.

I want to make an important point here. Ordinary people who rallied for safer food shared this information and signed petitions were able to make these changes. We did this on our own. But isn't this something that the people in Washington are elected politicians should be doing? This game of whack-a-mole I've been playing with other concerned citizens for the last 10 years isn't enough to protect Americans

from the unethical and hypocritical practices of these companies. We deserve the same safer ingredients other countries get. We cannot allow our own American companies to treat us this way anymore. We've had enough, it's unethical, and it needs to stop. Right now we're at a critical moment where Americans are sicker than ever, and much of this is due to the alarming amount of harmful chemicals allowed in our food. Asking companies to remove artificial food dye would make an immediate impact. They don't need to reinvent the wheel.

they already have the formulations, as I've shown you. Consumption of artificial food dyes has increased by 500% in the last 50 years, and children are the biggest consumers. Yes, those children. Perfect timing. 43% of products marketed towards children in the grocery store contain artificial dyes. Food companies have found in focus groups, children will eat more of their products,

with an artificial dye because it's more attractive and appealing. And the worst part, American food companies know the harms of these additives because they were forced to remove them overseas due to stricter regulations and to avoid warning labels that would hurt sales. This is one of the most hypocritical policies of food companies and somebody needs to hold them accountable. The FDA is asleep at the wheel. They've admitted they're not capable of regulating all these chemicals in our food,

and the food companies are using the lack of regulation to their advantage. But now there's a significant wave of public awareness spreading about this corruption, and more people are asking for change. Many of the people in this room I see in the audience. Our grassroots movement is continuing, and I'm now asking for your support. Right now, we are petitioning Kellogg's because the government hasn't taken up this issue. Right over the border, this box of fruit loops is from Canada. It's colored naturally with watermelon, blueberry, and carrot juice.

This is the U.S. version. It contains four different artificial food dyes with the preservative B.HT, which is an endocrine-disrupting chemical linked in cancer. In 2015, Kellogg's announced plans to remove dyes from their cereals by the end of 2018, but they never did. Instead, they kept producing new cereals for children with these dyes and preservatives. Using the most popular toddler songs and movies to hook modern children of today, like Baby Shark cereal and Disney's Little Mermaid, targeting the most vulnerable children.

We now have over 111,000 signatures on our petition to ask Kellogg's to finally serve Americans the same cereals they are serving other countries. I'm going to be delivering these petitions to Kellogg's headquarters in Battle Creek, Michigan, next month on October 15th. Mark your calendar with many of the health leaders in this room, and I'm inviting all concerned citizens to join me, including all the politicians here today and in Washington and both presidential candidates.

This issue is nonpartisan and affects all of us. It's time for us to join together and end this corruption once and for all. Thank you very much. Well, Vani, first of all, thank you for all your hard work on our behalf. And I was going to ask you a question, but you already asked it yourself. I mean, isn't that what the FDA should be doing? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, when Michael Taylor was the deputy commissioner of the FDA,

he said, he admitted on NPR, we don't have the resources, we don't have the capabilities to actually regulate food chemicals because we don't have the staff. There's no one there. Like, we are under this assumption. And I think a lot of Americans are under this assumption that every single food additive ingredient that you buy at the grocery store has been approved by some.

regulatory body. It hasn't. It's been approved by the food companies themselves. There's thousands of chemicals where the food company creates it, submits the safety data, and then the FDA rubber stamps it because they don't have any other option. So we're living in a world of the wild, wild west. It wouldn't be that hard to compare the 10,000 ingredients to the what? 400. 400 in Europe? And start there, right? Yeah, I love it. So, well, apparently this is a one-two punch here, right? Yep. So our next presenter is Jason Karp. Jason is the founder and CEO of

Human Co, a mission-driven company that invests in and builds brand brands focused on healthier living and sustainability. In addition to Human Co., Jason is the co-founder of Hugh Kitchen, known for creating the number one premium organic chocolate in the U.S. My wife will appreciate that. Prior to Human Co., Jason

spent over 21 years in the hedge fund industry where he was the founder and CEO of an investment fund that managed over $4 billion. Jason graduated, Summa Kuhnade from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Jason. Thank you for having me, Senator. Let me just first start by saying it's such an honor to be here, and I'm so proud to call Vani one of my partners. We are a one-two-pudge.

It's going to be tough to follow that one. And I also had just a couple comments before I give my prepared remarks that are a bit more optimistic. Some of the problems that we're talked about today are actually not that hard. They're just hard to conclusively prove. Casey mentioned that we're having a spiritual crisis right now, and that partially entails the fact that we've lost our North Star. We have an over-reliance on scientific studies at the expense of common sense. Based on what Dr. Palmer said,

we don't need 10 years of clinical-controlled studies to know that we shouldn't have plastic in our brains. We don't need 10 years of studies. to know that if there's a pesticide that kills every insect, every microorganism, that we don't need 10 years of study to know that we should not be putting that in mass quantities in our bodies. So now to the prepared remarks. I've been a professional investor for 26 years dealing with big food companies, seeing what happens in their boardrooms and why we now have so much ultra-processed food.

With proof there are ways to responsibly scale food, I am also the co-founder of food. also the co-founder of Hugh Kitchen, a health food company where we created the number one premium chocolate in the U.S. without using chemicals, synthetics, and being 100% organic. And this is a deeply personal issue for me today. After miraculously curing an incurable eye disease that was making me blind in my 20s by using food as medicine, I have dedicated the last 23 years of my life to researching and trying to clean up our uniquely toxic American food system. Given the exponential rise in our chronic diseases in just the last 50 years,

many ask, how did we get here and what has changed? Americans now live in a toxic soup of synthetic chemicals, plastics, and untenable pesticide loads that permeate our food, water, and air. Having studied the evolution of corporations, I believe the root cause of how we got here is an unintended consequence of the unchecked and misguided industrialization of agriculture and food. I believe there are two key drivers behind how we got here. First, America has much looser regulatory approach to approving new ingredients and chemicals than comparable developed countries. Europe, for example, uses a guilty until proven innocent standard for the approval of new chemicals, which mandates that if an ingredient might pose a potential health risk,

it should be restricted or banned for up to 10 years until it is proven safe. In complete contrast, our FDA uses an innocent until proven guilty approach for new chemicals or ingredients that's known as grass or generally recognized as safe. This recklessly allows new chemicals into our food system until they are proven harmful. Shockingly, U.S. food companies can use their own independent experts to bring forth a new chemical without the approval of the FDA. It is a travesty that the majority of Americans don't even know they are constantly exposed to thousands of untested ingredients that are actually banned or regulated in other countries. To put it bluntly, for the last 50 years, we have been running the largest uncontrolled science experiment ever done on humanity without their consent.

Why should America, the greatest country on earth, be the last developed nation to protect its people. And the proof is in the pudding. Our health differences compared to those other countries who use stricter standards are overwhelmingly conclusive when looking at millions of people over decades. On average, Europeans live around five years longer, have less than half our obesity rates, have significantly lower chronic disease, have markedly better mental health, and they spend as little as one-third on health care per person as we do in this country. While lobbyists and big food companies may say we cannot trust the standards of these other countries because it over-regulates, it stifles innovation, and it bans new chemicals prematurely,

I would like to point out that we trust many of these other countries enough to have nuclear weapons. These other countries have demonstrated it is indeed possible to not only have thriving companies, but also prioritize the health of its citizens with a clear, do-no-harm approach towards anything that humans put in or on our bodies. The second driver, how we got here, is all about incentives. U.S. industrial food companies have been myopically incentivized to reward profit growth, yet bear none of the social costs of poisoning our people and our land. Since the 1960s, America has seen the greatest technology and innovation boom in history.

As Big Food created some of the largest companies in the world, so too did their desire for scaled efficiency. Companies had noble goals of making the food safer, more shelf stable, cheaper, and more accessible. However, they also figured out how to encourage more consumption by making food more artificially appealing with brighter colors and engineered taste and texture. This is the genesis of ultra-processed food. Because of these misguided regulatory standards, American companies have been highly skilled at maximizing profits without bearing the societal costs. They have replaced natural ingredients with chemicals.

They have commodified animals into industrial widgets, and they treat our God-given planet as an inexhaustible, abusable resource. Sick Americans are learning the hard way that food and agriculture should not be scaled in the same ways as iPhones. After watching this go on for too long and spending a lot of time with Vani, earlier this year I filed a shareholder activist letter against Kellogg for selling a less safe, inferior version of their cereals to American families. As Vani pointed out, very few Americans know that Kellogg sells a safer, cleaner version of their cereals in Europe than the ones they sell here.

They use more chemicals in the U.S. version because it is more profitable and because we allow them to. The absurd question we should all be asking today is why shouldn't American children receive the safest version of products that Kellogg already makes. To highlight the perverse incentives, Senator, Kellogg declined to meet with us and effectively told us that American children prefer the brighter colors. And they will continue selling the more toxic versions as long as it's, quote, compliant with applicable, relevant laws. Which is why I'm here today. We need your help to stop this behavior. Because of our lax regulations and public company incentives to prioritize profits over safety, millions of Americans are constantly subjected to uncontrolled trials of chemicals that are banned or regulated all over the world.

While there may be many difficult issues discussed today, this one is easy because healthier countries are already showing us how it can be done. By adopting the same chemical regulatory approach of healthier developed nations, we can take a significant and absolutely necessary step in both providing safer food and lowering health care costs for all Americans. We can reverse this great American poisoning, and we already have a playbook on how to do it. Thank you. So a question for both of you combined. You've done the research into these different chemicals, and you talked about dyes and make it more. powerful so more attracted your children. What are the other attributes? I mean, what else do they gain out of this? You know, better preservatives? I mean, what, you know what I'm saying? I mean,

artificial food dyes are cheaper and they are brighter. And the reason that I chose to use artificial food dyes in my public activist letter is because there's basically no counter argument. Many of the things discussed today, I think there is a nuanced debate. But with artificial food dyes, they have shown all over the world that they can use colorants that come from fruit. This is the Canadian version. This is the brightness of the Canadian version, just for visibility,

and this is the brightness of artificial food dyes. So, of course, Kellogg and other food companies will argue children prefer this over this, just as they would prefer cocaine over sugar. That doesn't make it okay. I think... I think we should point out that I don't think Dr. Means would recommend either of those versions. Got to start somewhere.

Senator, can I just say one thing as Jason and Vani were talking? It brought me back to working for the food industry. We used to pay conservative lobbyists to go to every office and say that it was the nanny state to regulate food. And I think that's as a conservative myself, something that's resonated. I just cannot stress enough that as we're hopefully learned today, the food industry has rigged our systems beyond recognition, and addressing a rigged market is not an attack on the free market. It is a necessity for a free market to take this corruption out. So I just want to say that.

Okay, thank you, Vani and Jason. I think we'll just go right down the list there, or the line. Our next year presenter is Jillian Michaels. Ms. Michaels is a globally recognized fitness expert, entrepreneur and best-selling author. With her no-nonsense approach to health, she has inspired millions through her fitness programs, books, and digital platforms. Best known for her role on the biggest loser, Michaels promotes a balanced approach to fitness and nutrition, emphasizing long-term health and self-improvement.

Ms. Michaels. Thank you. Thank you. You know, we all wrote these speeches in a silo, and yet you're hearing us all. say very similar things. I almost feel bad bashing you guys over the head with this one more time, but Callie put this panel together meticulously and one thing he asks very often is where's the outrage? Where is the outrage? So maybe by hitting you guys over and over it will really piss you off. Yes, yes. So here I go. During the time that we've been given to speak with

you today. Roughly 800 people will die of an obesity-related disease that was completely preventable. And it's not just their loss that should elicit your devastation and your outrage, but the immense suffering of those left behind by those gone too soon. And it should also go without saying the ways in which obesity robs our nation of able bodies to defend our freedom, robs our nation of the brightest and best, as childhood obesity is linked to lower academic performance, and robs our nation of economic vitality with a financial impact estimated to range from $500 billion to a trillion annually when you combine direct health care costs, loss productivity, and social burdens. Our role as the dominant player on the world stage is being forfeited.

My name is Gillian Michaels. I am a health advocate, a fitness expert, and a nutritionist. I have no political alliance because health transcends partisanship and ideology. Unlike the majority of issues, I imagine people in Washington contend with on a daily basis. This one is not nuanced. It's black and white. It's right and wrong. It's good against evil. The experts accompanying me today are sharing with you the staggering depth of corruption, big corporations engage in

to transform Americans as yonkins. as possible into fat, sick, and nearly dead cash cows. They're terrifying you with skyrocketing statistics of infertility, autism, early onset, cancer diagnosis, type 2 diabetes, and a host of other horrors. They're detailing for you what needs to change and how to change it. I've traditionally worked outside the system, trying to empower people to help themselves instead of waiting for lifeboats that may never arrive. But that said, it's become harder and harder for people to take agency and enact change for the reasons we're laying out for you today. And ultimately, I have discovered that despite my best efforts and the efforts of people here

like me, Americans need systemic help and they need it urgently. We sit here before you today to set the stage, establish the stakes from firsthand perspectives, and hopefully inspire you to act upon some of the suggestions provided. I aim to do this with a story about one of the lucky ones, one that escaped the spider web of corporate rapacity, a story about me. Today, I'm widely known as an individual synonymous with fitness, but this wasn't always the case. In 1974, the year that I was born, less than 10% of our population was overweight or obese. And prior to that, over the course of all human existence, being overweight or obese, was considered extremely unusual, and rare. And somehow they weren't holding panels, by the way. Nobody needed a panel to figure it out.

But by the late 70s, suddenly the rate in which our population began to grow in size became supersonic. For the time I was 13, in 1987, I was already 170 pounds at only 5'1, officially clinically obese. And from the year I was born to the year, I turned 21, obesity rates had tripled. Today, in 2020, as we've said now numerous times, it's estimated that roughly 75% of our adult population is obese or overweight. The entirety, almost, of my generation, along with the two generations that followed, have fallen victim to America's unchecked obesity crisis and over 170 comorbidities that go along with it. I don't know about you, but I've watched my friends jabbing themselves every day with fertility drugs, praying for a pregnancy, my friends getting up at the crock of dawn to get radiated where the lump was found in their breasts,

my friends swallowing fistfuls of pills to manage their debilitating anxiety and depression. The decades between 1980 and now didn't begin a genetic quantum leap in which our DNA inexplicably mutated to make American bodies expand and fall ill at an unprecedented pace. And while Gen X, millennials, and Gen Z have our problems, 75% of us are not stupid, weak, or lazy. you are wondering what has happened to us? And we're here to tell you. In the late 70s and the early 80s,

a sinister series of events converged to change food and subsequently health in America indefinitely. A plague that crept like a fog while we slept, literally and figuratively blindly trusting that the powers that be would never betray us. I mean, it seemed unthinkable to question whether a corporation would poison us for profit. I mean, the widespread assumption, at least when I was a kid, was that they were acting on our behalf.

They wanted to make food more affordable and more convenient. But it was this betrayal of trust that allowed them to insidiously infiltrate every part of our lives. Home-cooked meals became fast food value meals, libraries and bookstores with no food or drink policies, installed cafes, selling 500-calorie coffee drinks and pastries, eggs, became heart disease cholesterol bombs and honey-nut Cheerios, got, labeled heart healthy. The default human condition in the 21st century

is obese by design. Specific traceable forms of what's referred to as structural violence are created by the catastrophic quartet of big farming, big food, big pharma, and big insurance. They systematically corrupt every institution

of trust which has led to the global spread of obesity and disease. Dysfunctional and destructive agricultural legislation like the Farm Bill, which favors high yield, genetically engineered crops like corn and soy, leading to the proliferation of empty calories, saturated with all of these toxins that we've been talking about today for three hours. It seems like we can never say enough about it. And then this glut of cheap calories provides a boon to the food industry giants. They just turn it into a bounty of ultra-processed, factory-assembled foods and beverages,

strategically engineered to undermine your society and foster your dependence like nicotine and cocaine. So we literally cannot eat just one. And to ensure that you don't, added measures are taken to inundate our physical surroundings. We're literally flooded with food and we are brainwashed by ubiquitous cues to eat, whether it's the Taco Bell advertisement on the side of a bus as you drive to work or the vending machine at your kids' school, there is no place we spend time that's left on touch. They're omnipresent. They commandeer the narrative with $30 billion worth of advertising dollars.

Commercials marketed to kids with mega celebrities eating McDonald's and loving it. Sponsored dietitians paid to promote junk food on social media, utilizing anti-diet body positivity messaging like derail the shame in relation to fast food consumption. Time magazine brazenly issuing a defense of ultra-processed foods on their cover. with the title, what if ultra-processed foods aren't as bad as you think? And when people like us try to sound the alarm, they ensure that we are swiftly labeled as anti-science, fat shamers, and even racists. They launch aggressive lobbying efforts to influence you, our politicians,

to shape policy, secure federal grants, tax credit, subsidy dollars, which proliferates their product and heavily pads their bottom line. They have created a perfect storm. in which pharmaceuticals that cost hundreds, if not thousands per month, like Ozembic, that are linked to stomach paralysis, pancreatitis, and thyroid cancer can actually surge. This reinforces a growing dependence on medical interventions to manage weight in a society where systemic change in food production and consumption is desperately needed and also very possible. These monster corporations have mastered the art of distorting the research,

research, influencing the policy, buying the narrative, engineering the environment, and manipulating consumer behavior. So given all of this, the question becomes, how did I escape? I mean, I still remember the lunches my mom would pack me as a little kid. I mean, it was such innocence and love, and she had no idea that my kindergarten lunchbox contains at least 50. Now I'm thinking it's far more carcinogens, solving some wall suppliers, coloring, preservatives. I have the list.

I'm going to skip it because we did it already. Frankenfoods like juice boxes with no juice. Process lunch meat held together by meat glue. I mean, as a tween, I would sit it on the couch after school, just numbingly inhaling Cheetos and Oreos in front of the TV. There was no such thing as meal times. I could stuff myself endlessly and never feel full. Buckets of KFC at night for our family dinner

because it was quick, convenient, affordable. And I remember I would lay in bed comatose. It was a lifestyle equivalent. to a death sentence, but we never questioned it because we were just a family that was simply attuned to the culture. So, and she comes no surprise that by that tender age of 13, I was obese, failing in school, and becoming increasingly depressed and despondent. And my mom began to feel helpless. She spoke to my pediatrician and a child psychiatrist, both of whom suggested she medicate me on Prozac and Ritalin, but she was watching many of her friends' kids on this exact same

protocol and they weren't improving. My mom was becoming progressively desperate to help me and then fate intervened. She met another mom whose child had been thriving since joining a local martial arts studio and she signed me up the next day. And my sensei was smart enough to recognize the ways in which America's youth were being routinely poisoned and he cared enough to create an environment where myself and the other students under his wing were educated, insulated, and nourished to become our best selves. I went on to get my black belt, I've become a trainer, a nutritionist, myself, with the intention of waking up the others and giving them the same tools that he gave me. And while I have been fortunate enough to pull many back from the edge, over the course of my

30-year career, I have lost just as many, if not more, than I have saved. I have watched them slip through my fingers, mothers that orphaned their children, husbands that widowed their wives. I have even watched parents forced to suffer the unthinkable loss of their adult children. There are not words to express the sadness I have felt and the fury, knowing that they were literally sacrificed at the altar of unchecked corporate greed. Most Americans are simply too financially strained, psychologically, drained, and physically addicted to break free without a systemic intervention, attempting to combat the status quo and the powers that be is beyond swimming upstream. It is like trying to push a rampaging

river that's infested with piranhas. After years of trying to turn the tide, I submit that the powers that be are simply too powerful for us to take on alone. I implore the people here that shape the policy to take a stand. The buck must stop with you while the American people tend to the business of raising children and participating in the workforce to ensure that the wheels of our country go around, they tapped you to stand watch. They tapped you to stand guard. We must hold these bad actors accountable. And I presume the testimonials you heard today moved, you digest them, discuss them, and act upon them. Because if this current trend is allowed to persist, the stakes will be untenable. We are in the middle of an extinction level event. The American people need help.

They need heroes and people of Washington. Your constituents chose you to be their champion. Please be the change. Thank you. So again, Jillian, that shows our appreciation for all your advocacy and your passion. I know Callie have a number of different suggestions legislatively, but I'd ask you just, you know, if there was one particular piece of legislation or one thing that we could do here in Washington, what would it be?

Get rid of Citizens United and get the money out of politics. Okay. Go, Kelly, this is your area. He's like, that's why you do what you do. Any other questions for Gillian? Well, I think Gillian should be in charge of the next presidents. We should bring the presidential fitness standards back and get kids moving. And I think Julian's been involved with that with President Clinton, President Obama.

We need you for the next one. We need to bring that back, Gillian. And any other ideas on how we can systemically get this? We just have to, as RFK says, we've got to care more about our children. And he says than hating each other, but also then the money. I mean, how much money? When is it enough? Really, I think all the times that I turn down opportunities to make a little extra money,

because when I'm on my deathbed, I don't want this on my conscience. I don't want these regrets. I want to be proud of the life that I've lived. and that means we got to make some sacrifices and take a stand. Well, on this topic, as you were talking, I just want to acknowledge the many staffers and health care policy, staffers particularly in this room,

who are standing up against the current and try to do the right thing. We have met with a hundred of them this morning. I've talked to well over 100, and I just want to thank the staffers in this room who are working to do the right thing. And I want to say, to the healthcare staffers slithering behind your bosses,

working to impress your future bosses at the pharmaceutical companies, the hospitals, the insurance companies, many of them there are in this building and we are coming for you. So next up is Ms. Courtney Swan. Ms. Swan is a nutritionist, real food activist, and founder of the popular platform Real Foodology. She advocates for transparency in the food industry

promoting the importance of whole foods, clean eating. Courtney is passionate about educating the public on the benefits of a nutrient-dense diet, and she encourages sustainable, chemical-free farming practices to ensure better health for people in the planet. Ms. Swan. Is that working now? Okay. Thank you so much, Senator. My name is Courtney Swan. I have a Master's of Science and Nutrition, and I host the Real Foodology podcast, and thank you so much for listening to us today. Our food is being tainted by dangerous chemicals and it's making us sick. In 2009, I started to get debilitating stomach aches. I bounced around between specialists with no clarity for two years until 2011, when I was diagnosed with

the gluten intolerance. I was also told to avoid corn and soy, which are common food sensitivities amongst my generation. Unfortunately, my story is not unique. Clueless to how this was connected to our food system, I started to do some digging. What I found was alarming. Our current agriculture system origin story involves large chemical companies, not farmers, chemists. 85% of the food that you are consuming started from a patented seed sold by a chemical corporation that was responsible for creating Agent Orange in the Vietnam War. Why are chemical companies feeding America? Corn, soy, and wheat are not only the most common allergens, but are among the most heavily pesticide sprayed crops today.

In 1974, the U.S. started spraying our crops with an herbicide called glyphosate. And in the early 1990s, we began to see the release of genetically modified foods into our food supply. It all seems to begin with a chemical company by the name IG Farben, the later parent company of Bayer. Farben provided the chemicals used in Nazi nerve agents and gas chambers. Years later, a second chemical company, Monsanto, joined the war industry with a production of Agent Orange, a toxin used during the Vietnam War. When the wars ended, these companies needed a market for their chemicals.

So they pivoted to killing bugs and pests on American farmlands. Monsanto began marketing glyphosate with a catchy name Roundup. They claimed that these chemicals were harmless and that they safeguarded our crops from pests. So farmers started spraying these supposedly safe chemicals on our farmland. They solved the bug problem, but they also killed the crops. Monsanto offered a solution with the creation of genetically modified, known as GMO crops that resisted the glyphosate in the Roundup that they were spraying. These Roundup-ready crops allow farmers to spray entire fields of glyphosate to kill off pests

without harming the plants, but our food is left covered in toxic chemical residue that doesn't wash, dry, or cook off. Not only is it sprayed to kill pests, but in the final stages of harvest, it is sprayed on the wheat to dry it out. Grains that go into bread and cereals that are in grocery stores and homes of Americans are heavily sprayed with these toxins. It's also being sprayed on oats, chickpeas, almonds, potatoes, and more. You can assume that if it's not organic, it is likely contaminated with glyphosate. In America, organic food by law cannot contain GMOs and glyphosate, and they are more expensive compared to conventionally grown options. Americans are being forced to pay more for food that isn't poisoned. The Environmental Working Group reported a test

of popular wheat-based products and found glyphosate contamination in 80 to 90% of the products on grocery store shelves. Popular foods like Cheerios, Goldfish, chickpea pasta like Bonza, nature valley bars were found to have concerning levels of glyphosate. If that is not alarming enough, glyphosate is produced by and distributed from China. In 2018, Bayer bought Monsanto. They currently have patented soybeans, corn, canola, and sugar beets, and they are the largest distributor of GMO corn and soybean seeds. Americans deserve a straight answer. Why does an agrochemical company own where our food comes from?

Currently, 85 to 100% of corn and soy crops in the U.S. are genetically modified. 80% of GMOs are engineered to withstand glyphosate. And a staggering 280 million pounds of glyphosate are sprayed on American crops annually. We are eating this Roundup Ready corn. But unlike GMO crops, humans are not Roundup Ready. We are not resistant to these toxins, and it's causing neurological damage, endocrine disruption. It's harming our reproductive health, and it's affecting fetal development. Glyphosate is classified as a carcinogen by the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer.

It is also suspected to contribute towards the rise in celiac disease and gluten sensitivities. They're finding glyphosate and human breast milk placentas are organs and even sperm. It's also being found in our rain and our drinking water. Until January of 2022, many companies made efforts to obscure the presence of GMOs and pesticides in food products from American consumers. It was only then that legislation came into effect mandating that these companies disclose such ingredients with a straightforward label stating made with bioengineered ingredients, but it's very small on the package.

Meanwhile, glyphosate still isn't labeled on our food. Parents in America are unknowingly feeding their children these toxic foods. Dr. Don Huber, a glyphosate researcher, warns that glyphosate will make the outlawed 1970s insecticide DDT look harmless in comparison to glyphosate. Why is the U.S. government subsidizing the most pesticide-spread crops using taxpayer dollars? These are the exact foods that are driving the epidemic of chronic disease. These crops heavily sprayed with glyphosate are then processed into, high-fructose corn syrup and refined vegetable oils, which are key ingredients for the ultra-processed

foods that line our supermarket shelves and fill our children's lunches in schools across the nation. Children across America are consuming foods such as goldfish and Cheerios that are loaded with glyphosate. These crops also feed our livestock, which then produce the eggs, dairy, and meat products that we consume. They are in everything. Pick up almost any ultra-processed food package on the shelf, and you will see the words, contains corn, wheat, and soy on the ingredients panel. Meanwhile, Bayer is doing everything it can to keep consumers in the dark while our government protects these corporate giants.

They fund educational programs at major agricultural universities. They lobby in Washington, and they collaborate with lawmakers to protect their profits over public health. Two congressmen are working with Bayer right now on the Farm Bill to protect Bayer from any liability despite already having to pay out billions to sick Americans who got cancer. from their product. They know that their product is harming people. Chronic illnesses are on the rise and half of our population is obese. This is a national security issue. Seventy-seven percent of young Americans are ineligible for military service. We have industrialized our food at the expense

of our health, prioritizing profits over people to the point where our bodies can no longer cope with this chemical assault. We must stop subsidizing the foods that make us sick. We must prioritize people over profit. This isn't just about policy, it's about survival. Let's create a future where our food system is designed to nourish us and not destroy us. Thank you. Thank you, Courtney. A couple of questions. So you really have two issues here, Ray, is any concern about just GMO seeds and GMO crops? And then you have the contamination glycosvate. Originally is a pre-emergent, but now spraying on the actual crops and getting the food. Can you differentiate those two problems? I mean, what concerns are of the GMO seeds? Maybe other

doctors on the panel can, I mean, any evidence of? I would say I think the biggest concern is that the, well, some of these crops already have a pesticide in them. So there's a, there's a certain crop called BT corn, and it has a BT gene in there that is known, the mechanism is that when the insects eat this corn, it makes their stomachs explode. And what I think is really interesting about this is that what it's doing is it's creating holes in the stomach lining of the bugs. And something that Americans are dealing with right now at really high rates is something called leaky gut syndrome, and that means that we're getting holes in the lining of our intestines. And what I find very strange is why did we think that this would affect insects and not affect humans?

That would be the $64,000 question here. So thank you, Courtney. But we've saved the best best for last. Our next presenter is Alex Clark. Ms. Clark is a food activist, advocate for healthier food systems, and the host of Culture Apothecary Podcast. She is committed to educating consumers on the importance of organic farming and the dangers of harmful additives and food products. Clark's mission is to inspire positive change in both personal health choices and industry standards, driving the movement toward cleaner, more responsible food production. Ms. Clark. Thank you, Senator. My average listener, like me is a woman in her late 20s and early 30s. And we demand accountability for how the

millennial generation was turned into a science experiment without our informed consent for the sake of enriching big pharma, big ag, and big food. Millennial women have started to have kids for the first time and they are disillusioned with how hard it has become to not only get pregnant, but also raise kids who are healthy, happy, and mentally well. Today, I am proud to represent them. The poisoning of our food and the environment is the issue for these independent women. It is devastating us and our children.

My name is Alex Clark, and I host Culture Apothecary. By virtually every measure, millennials are more health-conscious than any generation before us, but at the same time, we are also the sickest. That is, until our children end up surpassing us. The next generation of children is predicted to not outlive their parents

if we continue on the trajectory that we are currently on. When in human history has that ever been the case? We are fatter than any prior generation at this age. We're having more fertility issues. New cancer diagnoses in the U.S. are projected to top 2 million for the first time this year, and these new cases are almost all driven by young people.

This is according to American Cancer Society data. What happened? Growing up, millennials were handed health advice that was inaccurate, mistaken, or downright fabricated. Almost everything that we were taught about food and health was made up. The only guidance that we received on what to eat came in 1992 via the Food Pyramid, a completely manipulated work of fake public health crafted by the Department of Agriculture. The food pyramid told us that all fat was bad, a lie. It told us to make complex carbs like pasta, bread, and processed breakfast cereal, the bedrock of our diet, not because it was healthy, but because it was the most profitable recommendation for big ag and big food.

We became the first generation subjected to sugary, fattening, inflammatory foods, deliberately engineered to be as addictive as heroin, thanks to the food companies buying the scientists from the cigarette companies for that. exact purpose. In the 80s and 90s, the same era as the food pyramid scam, youth obesity tripled from 5% to 15%. Today in 24, close to half of all American kids are overweight or obese. Now, why are you surprised? Ultra-processed foods make up 70% of the calories that kids eat now. Now, most of us millennial girls got our first period when we were 13 to 15 years old. Pediatricians wasted no time telling us that there was a magic pill that could solve all of our problems in a 10-minute wellness checkup with no informed consent about the risks or side effects. What problems were we solving exactly? A couple pimples.

We were advised to not worry about learning to track our cycle or understand our hormones. No conversation about how our likelihood to experience anxiety or depression would increase by 80% on the pill. 10 to 15 years went by on the hormonal birth control pill. We stayed on the pill because no one advised us it was only ever supposed to be taken temporarily. Then we wanted to have children. We got off birth control for the first time in our adult lives only to discover that we had major fertility issues that the hormonal birth control hid. Infertility is going up 1% every year. Suddenly, starting a family means spending tens of thousands of dollars on IVF and other fertility treatments

because even more medical interventions are always the first solution rather than addressing the root causes of the problem. If the IVF even works, millennial moms are seeing the same drama play out for their own children but on a far greater scale. They want to raise healthy kids. They do. But where can they go for info? The studies are bought and paid for by the food companies. They look for unbiased info on the news, but that's funded by Big Pharma. In 2022, the pharmaceutical industry spent an average of $1 billion per month on advertising in the United States. What news company is going to risk reporting the truth if it means missing out on advertising dollars like that.

Their pediatrician, these moms, pediatrician, had less than a day of nutrition training in all their years of medical school. They don't even know what seed oils are when they ask about them. If one of my listeners has a child today, there is a one in 50 chance that child will have a deadly peanut allergy four times what it was just a few decades ago. And that rate is rising. Children today are about 20% more likely to develop type 1 diabetes than they were 20 years ago. Childhood cancer rates are rising a percentage point every year.

Asthma is up, so is ADHD, allergies, virtually every type of psychological disorder. In 1980, autism was diagnosed at a rate of just three or four per hundred thousand kids. Today, a newborn child has a one in 36 chance that he or she will be autistic. And that rate is also rising every year. Who cares about politics if the next generation is dead or close to it before they can even vote? In 1985, newborn millennials had to follow a schedule of just a handful of vaccines. Today, a child following the recommended vaccine schedule will receive up to 70 shots by the time they turned 18, including 27 before he or she turns two and as many as six shots in a single visit.

Are all these shots producing healthier kids? According to the data, no. Are we allowed to even ask? Also, no. Some parents who've asked too many questions about the recommended vaccine schedule can find themselves reported to child protection services. Or they will get kicked out of their pediatrician's office

for not being compliant. This is America, the land of the free. Parents are being held hostage. They did not sign up to co-parent with the government. We want a divorce. But there's more. Remember when I said that my generation had our first period at 13 or 15? Today, little girls are starting their periods at 8 or 9,

and they are getting pubic hair as young as 5 or 6. Is it their drinking water, their food, chemicals, and personal care products that other countries have banned? Don't ask, don't tell. Girls are still being pressured to get on birth control, by the way, without informed consent, but now they get the added bonus of an antidepressant to go with it. Two for one special. Just to reiterate the war on moms in this country,

today, virtually everything a child eats or drinks will be served on a plastic plate in a plastic bottle or be eaten from a plastic container with plastic utensils. Human breast milk now contains thousands of microplastics. If you need formula, you can't find it without inflammatory seed oils or soy. Parents have to order it and buy it from Europe. Does this all seem overwhelming to you? Good. This is what the American mom deals with every day.

Amen. The typical American parent today has to worry about a job, about their children's education, about all the things that a parent has always had to worry about. They shouldn't also have to deal with the added stress of finding the poison that lurks in almost everything their child eats or drinks. The American dream is that a parent will be able to raise children who are better off than themselves. But now that dream is vanishing, not just on an economic level, but a biological one.

Unless we break this spiral, we will fall into a death spiral of unhealthy parents raising even more unhealthy kids that will bankrupt this country. As RFK Jr. has said, the last thing standing between a child and an industry full of corruption is a mom. Let's make it easier for them. Okay, so we have the room for another half hour. All the presenters have made their statements, we've asked some questions. Generally in hearings, I've generally let panelists, if you've got one more point you need to make, if you have that do this, okay? I'm not sure we'll

have time to take any questions from the audience. We may be able to do that, but I know Bobby Kenny's got to leave. Did you want to say anything, or did you want to have Callie make close the Parliament? First of all, I want to thank you again, Senator Johnson, and Senator, thank you for coming and all the other political leaders I've seen come in and out. I'm very grateful to them for finally paying attention to this issue. I spent kind of 40 years in this space, And for most of that time, the Democratic Party was the party that was fighting this issue. And today, it's been a complete inversion, and it's now the Republican Party generally. But I would say the appeal that I would make to Americans is that there's no such thing as Republican children or Democratic children.

Over the 20,000 generations of human beings that have lived on this planet before us, the primary biological drive and spiritual drive has been to make sure that their kids were safe. And it's extraordinary today that these profit-making corporations have used their capacity to control our government and to control the media to turn us all against that most fundamental biological drive. We are destroying our kids, and we're doing it because we're being manipulated to do it through all of the institutions of government.

And as an environmental activist and attorney, it was obvious to me very early on, and whenever you see the commoditization of the environment, of human beings, that there is always a subversion of democracy that is cotermin. And that's what we've seen. We've seen all of these institutions, the media, the health agencies, the agricultural agencies, the American press, the medical system, twisted to turn against their fundamental mission. And our country is supposed to be the exemplary nation in the world.

We've, we, in 18, 1776, we were the, between then and 1792, we became the first democracy in modern history. By 1860, there were five democracies that were all based on the American model. By the time my uncle was president, 130. by the end of the 1960s, 190, and all of them were looking to us as a model. And we have now become the worst country in the world from the key metric by which every success of a nation can be measured, which is are we giving our children a chance to live better lives than we do.

And this, you know, our country, to me, is still the greatest country in the world. And we have an extraordinary resilience. We have the worst agricultural practices in the world. We have the best regenerative farmers, the best organic farmers, the best dry land agriculture, no-till agriculture. We're at the cutting edge of all of those things. So we have that entrepreneurial spirit. that is still alive in our country. We have the worst health care system

and the worst health outcomes in the world. We have the best functional medicine doctors, the best integrative medicine doctors, all the cutting-edge work on those issues is being done in this country. We have some of the worst business practices in the declining economy. We have the best entrepreneurs

in this country, of any country in the world. So we have this inherent resilience in our country. And if we can, as somebody mentioned, I said, we need to stop hating each other. And that's only going to happen when we start loving our children more than we hate each other. And when that happens, we're going to be able to recover and very, very quickly.

And so I'm optimistic about it despite, this dark cloud that has been portrayed here tonight. You know, we could over the next two decades encountered terrible crises in this country. We could experience economic collapses from many factors. We could have other pandemics, other wars, and they could really devastate our country. As long as we have that resilience,

We're always going to bounce back as Americans. We're not going to do that if our kids all have chronic disease. It's too much of an anchor on progress. If you have a child that's dependent on pharmaceutical medications for the rest of their lives, that is weakened, demoralized, dispirited, disheartened by these illnesses, it's going to inhibit our capacity to function in any meaningful way in the way. world. If a foreign nation did this to our country, we would consider an act of war. It is on America. These companies have been allowed, through the profit motive, to destroy everything that we

value in America. And this is not just economic warfare. It's not just chemical warfare. we're all involved in spiritual warfare. And we have to understand that. The core of people who are here today, the leaders who have convened this, leaders from all of these different groups, from the medical profession, healthy foods, all of these advocates

and the political leaders have all given us a reason. for hope and they're leading a battle to for the heart for the soul of our country and it's a spiritual battle and that's something we all need to understand the American Revolution started with a very very small core of activists who were able to articulate these new set of values and they did something that nobody in the world could believe a rag-tag group of people brought to its needs, the greatest empire in the history of mankind. We can take our country back from these industries, and we can restore not only our democracy and the integrity of it, most important of all, we can begin restoring our children's health.

So we do have the room for a few more minutes. I see Jason's got his—I've got a couple questions. I know Alex talked about infertility, whether you can answer or others. Obviously talked about the birth control pill. I guess I'd talk to Dr. Means Mead, what is driving the infertility problem because it's both male and female issues? Alex and others have mentioned total infertility rates are going up 1% per year at a sustained rate. Sperm counts are declining 1% per year.

This has been happening in the 1970s. This is why we're at about 50% less sperm count on average. A Harvard study recently showed that men who are, who are already, obese have an 80% higher chance of having zero sperm in their semen. So this is a real issue, and it seems to be driven in large part by metabolic disease as well as the way that these endocrine hormone-disrupting chemicals are affecting our hormone levels that are required to generate a healthy fertility in both men and women. When we look at women, the key cause of female and fertility is polycystic ovarian syndrome, a misinomer. It's a metabolic reproductive

syndrome. The NIH tried to change the name to metabolic reproductive syndrome about 10 years ago. That was shut down. This is a disease driven by high insulin levels, which is a key element of metabolic dysfunction insulin is the hormone that takes sugar out of the bloodstream. High insulin levels tell the ovaries to produce too much testosterone. This disrupts the delicate balance of sex hormones. Women don't ovulate and therefore can't. can't get pregnant. This is affecting up to 26% of women worldwide today. When we look at men, low testosterone is a key cause of why we're not making sperm, but one of the reasons that we have low testosterone is because the abdominal fat around the midline

that of course is growing every year with 74% obesity and overweight, this fat around the midline is actually metabolically active. It has an enzyme on it called aromatase that actually converts testosterone to estrogen in men. in men. So the fat around the midline in men is like a giant ovary that is converting testosterone to estrogen. This, of course, disturbs the balance of spermatogenesis and sperm council declining every year in proportion to how obese we're getting. On top of all of this, we are living in a world where it is ubiquitous that there are microplastics and pesticides on every single thing we touch, the air we breathe, the water we're drinking, and pesticides like atrazine, which is illegal in other countries,

but we spray about 70 million pounds of it on American farmland every year, it is an estrogenic compound. It is impacting estrogen receptors. So in both men and women, it's driving extra estrogen load. And similarly with plastics, they are xenostrogens. So they are estrogenic-like molecules that act on the receptors. So for all of these reasons, we are dealing with a species-level event where if these rates continue at the rate that they are, we can only imagine what's going to happen to our ability to reproduce the American society.

And like so many things, we're just not paying enough attention to it, correct? Jason, you had a comment. Yeah, I just wanted to make a comment for the crowd here and the audience that's a bit of optimism. having studied all these public companies and knowing that a significant part of how we got here is actually from these public companies. What I can tell you is that they're all relatively low growth rate companies, but they have grown their earnings every single year, pretty much. And because they're low growth rate companies, they react extremely quickly to when their earnings start to decline. This is just one way of saying that you as consumers have a lot more

power than you realize. Most of what we talked about today were top-down solutions of how we can work with government to help. But the fastest way to help is if consumers start boycotting with their wallet. I say this without exaggeration, that if any one of these public companies mentioned today or any of the large companies that you know of the big food companies, if they had just a 5% drop, just five in sales, if you had all of you here, or hopefully there's some very, very, very large influencers listening or celebrities, if any one of those people came out and said, do not buy U.S. Kellogg cereal until they put in the same ingredients that they sell abroad. and that caused sales to decline by 5%, just five, in one quarter, they would change this

overnight. It's my hope that panels like this and all the media work, all you do, will convince more American consumers to demand healthier foods. Just start trying to buy healthier foods, you know, expand the availability and distribution of things like organic. So that's maybe a little more positive. We're doing it. Callie, I know you've got some things you want to say at the end.

I'm overwhelmed by what's happening in this room. I think we all feel a special moment. I think we're all talking about. We all feel it where there's a bipartisan understanding of this issue that this issues we're talking about today is the most important issue facing America, the incentives of our biggest industries to profit from drugging our kids and then after poisoning them. On the bottoms up, I think a bottoms up revolution is happening. you get outside the corporate controlled media that's totally bought off by pharma, we're all

gravitating to information to be healthier and to get our kids healthier. I mean, the most popular podcasts, you know, from Joe Rogan on down are essentially chronic disease metabolic health podcasts. I thought this guy was crazy during COVID, you know, with all the bad information about him. I tune in. He's talking about exercising, looking at the sun, you know, eating healthy food. I'm like, this is pretty radical stuff. He was into me number one from the NIH leaked emails. But the podcast and podcast represented around this room, the books, Americans want to be healthy. And just, you know, I think there is a bottoms up revolution happening, but I think we need to, especially in this room, be clear, we cannot go on existing

as a species if our largest institutions, our largest industries have co-opted our institutions of trust, our regulatory authorities, our government itself, and continue to profit trillions and trillions of dollars from us being addicted, from us being in fear, from us being sick. We have to have top-down change. And just speaking with bipartisan leaders and speaking with Bobby, I mean, I do think, and I think we all need to get this in our heads. It's not complex. It just takes political courage. A fundamental tenet of our health care policy is we need to trust the American patient wants to be healthy. We need to have faith in the American patient, and we truly just need to do two things. We need to, number one, get corruption out of medical guidelines, and number two,

open up health care flexibility. Let me just talk real quick about those two. Get corruption out of the medical guidelines. Americans listen to their doctors. When the surgeon general too late in 1980s said smoking was bad, smoking rates plummeted. We followed the food pyramid. We followed the vaccine scheduled by and large, for better or worse. We listen to medical authorities and institutions that want to profit off sick kids have learned that and completely co-opted our medical institutions. As a simple statement of economic fact, the pharmaceutical industry is the largest funder of news. They are the largest funder of medical They are the largest funders of medical schools.

They're the largest funder of civil rights groups, believe it or not. They are the largest funder of politicians themselves. They spend five times more on political donations and public affairs and lobbying than the oil industry. So the pharmaceutical industry, just as a simple statement of economic fact, has co-opted our institutions of trust. What do we need to do? We need to not get into complex policy debates because that is the same. because that is where evil hides. We need to have simple actions one by one. We need to not, to disallow USDA officials who make nutrition guidelines for our children to take money

from food companies, period. Every American listening would assume that's already the case. It's not. And it's a huge problem. And that is why added sugar is part of a healthy diet for a two-year-old, according to the USDA guidelines. We need to reset the NIA, the NIH's founding mission to do foundational research on why we're getting sick, not be an outsourced R&D lab for the pharmaceutical industry. Everyone would expect this is already the case. The NIH, 90% of the funding is on incremental cures. They're not studying why we're getting Alzheimer's.

They're studying marginal ineffective drugs for Alzheimer's. We have to have population-wide studies to understand why we're getting sick. That should be the full focus of the NIH. Why is the FDA funded by the pharmaceutical industry? I've spoken to member after member who are very concerned about that in this building, but they slide it in. Why is pharma lobbying to pay billions of dollars out of pocket to fund their own regulatory agency? I've talked to health care staffers who support this for whatever reason and said, oh, it's a money saver. It's $3 billion.

$3 billion, as if this building cares about $3 billion. That's $3 billion that we could have the taxpayer pay to not allow the agency that regulates drugs to be co-opted by the industry that's trying to regulate. That would be $3 billion well spent. The FDA should not be funded by the pharmaceutical industry. I've been in D.C. long enough to know that institutions are built to grow, and if the incentives of a bureaucracy is to grow, as a... the pharmaceutical industry goes and there's zero conflicts of interest rules about the FDA

commissioner going straight to the board of Pfizer, it creates really bad incentives. We have to just untangle the FDA from the pharmaceutical industry. And number two, we need to disaggregate the F and the D. Why is the pharmaceutical industry funding the institution that oversees our food? We need to do these simple things. One other is SNAP. It is absolutely suicidal public policy that with the program that lower income Americans depend on for supplemental nutrition, that 10% of that goes to sugary drinks and 70% goes to ultra-process food. We are underwriting the poisoning of our lower-income population, and then Medicaid picks up as a lifetime annuity to pharma. We are spending more on mitochondrial dysfunction, diabetes and related conditions,

just on Medicaid than the entire U.S. defense budget is going to bank. corrupt our country. It's destroying our human capital. It's not working. We should not be subsidizing ultra-processed food for children. The last, and just on this corruption, very importantly, is that the pharmaceutical industry is able to buy off our information sources. We are the only country essentially in the world that allows that. During COVID, there was zero curiosity about why we were dying at a three-time higher rate than any other country. When you listen to independent media, all they're talking about is the exploding rates of chronic conditions. There is never a segment.

CNN, NBC, to Dayshoke, they would not have my sister and I on. We have a book about medical empowerment. They won't have any health care author on that even questions medical orthodoxy. I've talked to the producers. They said, no fly zone because it would go against who's paying their bill. It is not liberal, it's not conservative to say that we should not have an institution that just fundamentally profits from Americans being sick, being able to buy off our information sources.

So getting corruption out of the science, we need to fearlessly get back to science and start just asking and answering basic questions. Is glyphosate safe? Are these food coloring safe? Is it appropriate to give a child a shot three hours into life for an STD? If we have the science right,

we need to just trust the American people then to make the right decision. They are clamoring for information, and that needs to come from the medical authorities, and that can happen very quickly. Number two, very quickly, if we have the right medical information, we have to get to flexible health care accounts. We have a top-down system where if you're on Medicare, you're on Medicaid, you're on many insurance, we actually mandate through law that it's a one-size-fits-all system. Most doctors don't even realize that they can write a letter of medical necessity recommending food,

recommending exercise that then opens up tax advantage spending often on HSAs and other flexible spending accounts. Casey didn't learn that at Stanford Medical School. Doctors are simply trained to write a script to, in a 15-minute appointment, name the condition, and drug it. We need to open up flexibility. We need to get the right information, just the clinically right information, the clinically right information that heart disease is not a statin deficiency, that metformin is not, that diabetes is not a metformin deficiency, that depression is not an SSRI deficiency. We need to open up and listen to Dr. Palmer, listen to the other doctors here, realize that disease is interconnected, have that research,

and then had the flexibility in our health care dollars for patients to work with doctors to choose the right intervention, which often involves food. I hate when food is talked about as this lifestyle bucket or this prevention bucket. Food clinically and exercise and these basic metabolic habits are clinically the most effective reversal, the effective treatments for the chronic conditions that are. are plaguing our industry. We need to stop talking about these fringe food as medicine bills. We need to stop talking about these fringe prevention programs.

It needs to be the center of health care, regenerative farming, transforming our food system, exercise. That is health care. If we can get the right medical guidelines and trust the American people to make the right decisions with their doctor and have flexibility where their health care dollars go, we will be a transformed country. Senator, thank you so much for convening this incredible. discussion. And I'll just end to Jason's point. We should be optimistic. What other country allows people into hollowed halls like this to absolutely savage the institution itself and big industries. This does not happen in China. This is part of the process. The seemingly

monolithic structures we're going against, I think, can change very quickly. with leadership here and leadership from outside. Thank you everyone so much for being here. Well, again, thank you, Callie, for assembling this panel, you know, Dr. Means, for being the inspiration. Let me end on a moment of hope. I'm generally not the most uplifting character. I have this compulsion tell the truth to describe reality,

and, you know, there are a lot of realities that aren't very uplifting right now. I used to say that the greatest threat facing this nation was the fact that we're a mortgage our children's future. We're not fixing that. We're exacerbating that with $35 trillion in debt. But last couple of years I've been saying the greatest threat to our nation is the fact that we are so horribly politically divided.

It was Lincoln during the Civil War, according scripture, said a house divided against itself cannot stand. The good news, and here's the hopeful news, we're not a naturally divided people. on the major goals of life, you know, raising our children, you know, wanting the best for them, safety, security, having enough opportunity, prosperity so we can take care of ourselves. I mean, these are the major life goals that we all agree on. You know, my working during COVID assembling panels of doctors, I never asked what their political affiliation was.

I found out later, most of them were not on my side of the aisle, but didn't make any difference. Now, I have no idea who's in this crowd today. I have no idea of the affiliation of the people of the panel. It doesn't make any difference. As I said, you know, applauding Bobby for his courage for what he's done, the decisions he's made just recently that has cost him so dearly personally. It is an example, this is an example, of how you heal and unify that horribly divided nation. and if we can use this as the example and move us forward, not only can we tackle this incredibly important problem and solve it.

I think all of you, again, you have ideas, we can do this, we can do this, we can do that, we can make progress on this. But in focusing on doing that in a completely nonpartisan way, not caring about people's political ideology, but what? is the problem and how do we actually fix it, we can set the example for how we fix all these other problems that plague our nation and their serious problems. So again, I just want to thank all the panelists for all you've done in the past. You've made a difference. You've helped improve, if not save people's lives. Thank you for doing that for your time here today. For all of

you who are watching this thing, spread the word. This is recorded. It can be viewed later on. You know? Maybe not the full four hours, but, you know, there will be some nice little gems here. Share those. And do what we can do as Americans. Heal and unify our great nation. God bless all of you. Thank you.