Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz - The Power of "Root Cause Health Care" with Marianne Williamson

Episode Date: December 11, 2023

Marianne Williamson, best known for her iconic book "Return to Love" and her recent venture into the Democratic nomination for President of the United States, joins Dr. Mindy to dissect the American healthcare system and also unveil her visionary plan for a "root cause healthcare system." This episode spans topics from transforming the food system and reshaping taste buds to addressing the struggles of living paycheck to paycheck - and the importance of community in fostering health. To view full show notes, more information on our guests, resources mentioned in the episode, discount codes, transcripts, and more, visit https://www.drmindypelz.com/ep212. Marianne Williamson is a candidate running for the Democratic nomination for President of The United States in 2024. She's a successful entrepreneur, bestselling author, political activist, and globally influential spiritual thought leader. The pillars of Williamson's Presidential campaign are the restoration of America's middle class through an Economic Bill of Rights, including universal healthcare, tuition free college and tech school, and a guaranteed living wage; the establishment of a Department of Peace and the Department of Children and Youth; the declaration of a Climate Emergency to mass mobilize for the development of a green energy grid; and ending America's Drug War. Williamson believes the transformation of American society requires that we address the root causes of our problems, and not only their symptoms. Check out our fasting membership at resetacademy.drmindypelz.com. Please note our medical disclaimer.

On this episode of The Resetter podcast, I am bringing you Marianne Williamson. So you all might know Marianne from a lot of different places. Return to Love was her famous book that launched her into the world. She has written many New York Times bestselling books since then. But the most recent adventure that she has taken on is running for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. States. And I have known Marianne for several years now. I was blessed to be a part of a author group where she took her wisdom as an author, which is phenomenal, by the way, and just poured it into a small group of us. And I learned so much about this woman's heart. And in that time, I also

learned so much about her values and what she cares about when it not only comes to the American people, but also when it comes to health care. So when I heard that she had a plan in her presidency to create a root cause health care system, I wanted to know what that was. And I wanted to bring that to you all. So what you are going to hear in this conversation is many pieces, but two major pieces. So, and this applies, by the way, I know we have a worldwide audience. So this applies to both, you know, people in America and other countries. Because what I want you to hear is that so many countries are dealing with a dysfunctional health care system.

And here in America, we are one of the worst. It not only is expensive to get health care here in America, but our chronic disease rates are skyrocketing. And our health care system does not have a solution. It is time that we go back to the root of our health and find a way to stay healthy collectively. And this is what you're going to hear in this conversation is you're not only going to hear about some of the troubling things going on in our health care system, but you're going to hear solutions. I would never bring you somebody who would only present a problem. I wanted to dive into this root cause health care system that she has very eloquently mapped out. And what does that mean? And it's everything.

Oh, the conversation was so good. It was everything from how do we change the food system to how do we change our taste buds to what do we do when we are all working so hard just to live paycheck to paycheck to why are we isolating ourselves and not living in communities and looking at community as a health care habit? We went in so many directions. And what I'm really hoping that you all will do is, A, listen through with an open mind. There's some things you're going to love that she's saying. There's some things that you're going to disagree with in this world where we just cancel people out because they're not for the right political party or we cancel people out because they don't believe

what we believe. This is an opportunity to sit and let's collectively have a discussion about how we can bring health back to the American people. And there are so many nuggets in this conversation. The second thing that I'm going to encourage you to do with this episode is if you resonate with it, send it out into the world,

not so you can just support Marianne. here to tell you who to support, but I am here to open up a conversation around health care that is not being had. And I wanted to bring her on to have it because at some point we have to say enough is enough. At some point we have to look at our lifestyle as the door out of poor health. And Marianne has some incredible solutions for it. So I bring you my friend Marianne Williamson, Enjoy this conversation. And if you love it, share it with the world. And more importantly, let's all come back to root health care.

Because the time has finally arrived. We are out of options. Root cause health care is the next wave of health care. Enjoy. Hey, Dr. Vindy here. And welcome to season four of the Resetter podcast. Please know that this podcast is all about empowering you to believe in yourself again. If you have a passion for learning, if you're looking

to be in control of your health and take your power back, this is the podcast for you. Enjoy. Let me just start by welcoming you for the second time to my podcast, Marianne. I'm so happy you're here. Well, I'm so happy to be here. And thank you for having me. And congratulations to you, Mindy, for the big splash you're making in the society today. Congratulations. Yeah, thank you. I want to start off with this health plan that you have because what I want everybody to understand is that root cause health care is not normal and it will change the world as we're going to discuss over the next hour. But what really caught my attention was the quote, on your page of what you're suggesting for health care from the Washington Post. And I want to read it

because it needs to be highlighted and we all need to understand how we can change this. So the quote that Marianne has is from the Washington Post and it was recently published and it says after decades of progress, life expectancy long regarded as a singular benchmark of a nation's success peaked in 2014 at 78.9 years. It then drifted downward, even before the coronavirus pandemic. And it's an extreme manifestation of an underlying deterioration of health and a failure of our health system to respond. And the article goes on to say chronic conditions thrive in a sync or swim culture with the U.S. government spending far less than peer countries on preventative medicine and social welfare generally. The calamity of chronic disease is a not so silent pandemic.

With that in mind, can you please help us understand why and where we have gotten so lost with our current health care system. Well, first of all, we do have a higher level of chronic illness in the United States than in any other advanced democracy. And all of those advanced democracies, as that quote points out, do think in terms of preventative measures. You and I come from a kind of thinking with our work where we understand that health is not the absence of sickness, sickness is the absence of health. You can't just not take care of your body, not take care of your lifestyle, not take care of your nutrition, and other factors involved in proactively creating health. And then when the almost inevitable sickness arises, use external remedies to seek

to suppress or eradicate symptoms. That's the old allopathic model that for millions of people has been dissolved long and long ago. But let's look at what we have. We have carcinogens in our food that they do not have in other advanced democracies. You can look at a bottle of ketchup in the United States versus a bottle of ketchup in Canada or Europe, for instance. There are all kinds of carcinogens that increase the shelf life of a product that are allowed here that in other countries would not be. Forty-six percent of our urban wells contain PFAS and our water, these forever chemicals, and obviously the toxins in our air. Then you add. You add, you as a lot of our oil. to that a lifestyle, which is so dominated for the majority of people by constant and chronic economic

stress and anxiety. Now, all of those things put together, and they are a toxic brew, out of which sickness is almost inevitable on some level of physical breakdown. Then you add to that the fact that we're the only advanced democracy that does not have universal health care. Now, what is all of this about? What's the common denominator? The common denominator. The common denominator is the fact that in all of these instances, you're talking about a situation where short-term profits, short-term profit maximization for some huge corporate entity, is placed above the safety and the health and the well-being of people. The crisis is that our government, because of the undue influence financially of those forces, actually enables

those forces, rather than doing what its purported job is, which is to advocate for the American people. So none of this should surprise anyone, and it would have been, it was in some cases predicted very long ago. So when we talk about, and you know, last time that I, and for president, last time, when I said on the debate stage, we don't have a health care system, we have a sickness care system. Because even the conversation of how we're going to treat sickness is limited to this old mechanistic way of thinking where you're only asking how do we treat the symptoms rather than how do we address the root causes. In almost every other area of our lives, people get that now. It's a very 21st century thing. You know, the mindset of the 20th century is

different than the mindset of the 21st, just like the 19th was different than the 20th. The 20th century mindset was very mechanistic. The world is a machine. You have a problem, you just tweak the pieces of the machine. Clearly, that has left us in many ways where we are. The 21st century mindset, far more holistic, far more whole person, recognizes the issue of consciousness. So when we talk about something like economic stress,

we understand the role that this plays in the creation and the continuation of sickness. So one of the last nuts we need to crack is politics, because politics, not being of this new thinking, has made a lot of us go, I don't want anything to do with it. And now a lot of us are going except that they're killing us all. You know, the high rates of sickness and the asthma and our children and the toxins in our air and the poison's in our water and our food. And I think what's happening now is people are recognizing that we are paying. far too high a price for the fact that our politics is stuck in this let's treat the symptom and ignore the cause type of mindset because it is becoming increasingly unsustainable. As you said, our life expectancy is lower.

And it's not even just that we're living less long, the quality of our lives. You know, Mindy, people's lives are falling apart. We need to tell you that. Just the level of chronic anxiety, whether it's that you can't. survive on just one job, 62% of our people have paycheck to paycheck, the majority of people can't afford a thousand dollar unexpected expenditure, that kind of chronic anxiety right there, whether it's your physical health or your personal health. And this situation won't stop unless we fundamentally stop it. It's built into the status quo at this time. So if we keep voting for the

status quo, nothing fundamental in any of that is going to change. So when we look at things like big pharma and big food and how they funnel, I'm just going to say it, money into the political system. Do we have a system where our politicians are making decisions based off of these two major industries and how they are being rewarded? And I may be wrong. And this is what I love about you is that you'll correct me if I'm wrong. But are they swayed by the two major industries that are contributing to our health. There's something funny about the fact that you think, ooh, can I say this?

It's what we need to say, okay? Excellent. Oh, really? Can I say that? Better. Excellent. So, well, big food and big pharma are part of a larger matrix. It's big insurance companies,

pharmaceutical companies, as you said. Big food companies, big chemical companies, the chemicals in our pesticides, for instance, big agricultural companies. It starts even with monocropping and the desecration of the soil. And then, of course, you have gun manufacturers, big oil and defense contractors.

So it's a matrix of corporate power. But when it comes to our health, the ones that affect us most, of course, are big pharma and big food. So big food does what we were talking about before, which is the carcinogens. Back in the 1980s, before Ronald Reagan,

they couldn't even do pharmaceutical ads on television. Right. Part of what the Reagan Revolution represented was this orgy of deregulation. And they called them job-killing regulations. Well, first of all, that's a lie because you actually had to hire people to make sure that you were in compliance. And what does this have to do? It had to do with getting rid of any barrier to what the corporation would feel was its capacity to make more money for its stockholders. So if you put carcinogens in a food, or all of the other things that we know, the sugars and the chemicals, et cetera.

If that the idea of that economic paradigm was the idea that if it increases financial value for the stockholders, then that is somehow for the betterment of society. Because those stockholders would create more jobs and the money would trickle down and it would lift all boats. Now, at this point, clearly the canard there is obvious to everyone. First of all, they weren't job creators. The business model there was job elimination rather than job creation. And it was the idea of moving resources in whatever way possible, getting rid of safety regulations, squashing unions, anything to put more money in the hands of the stockholders, which was then at the expense of other

stakeholders, the workers, the safety, the community, the environment, and so forth. And so when that's how it works in terms of big food, just get rid of any kind. When I was growing up, an FDA agent could go into a grocery store and if something was proven to be carcinogenic, could say out, off, off the shelves now. And they have so de-juiced the Food and Drug Administration. that for the most part, the most that the FDA agent could do now is write a polite, nice letter to the CEO, please, sir, would you kindly consider, given the fact that we have proof of what this does to a child's brain, would you please, sir, consider? And this is what's called corporate capture of these agencies, that these agencies, which were set up,

such as the Food and Drug Administration or the Environmental Protection Agency or whatever, these agencies were set up to advocate for the people. And instead, they have turned into this dual function where so many corporate titans control with their people within these agencies that sometimes these agencies that are meant to advocate for the people do more to advocate for the corporate donors. Donor class, this is what we're talking about. So years ago, there was a, I think it was a,

in 2013. I think it was 2013. There was a Supreme Court decision called Citizens United. And it allowed, as per that decision, corporations can give unlimited, what's called dark money to influence these campaigns. So routinely, our legislators will vote in ways that do more to increase profits for their donors than to serve the safety and the health and the well-being of the American people. They've just turned Washington really into a system of legalized bribery. Now, when it comes to Big Pharma, this is what's so mind-boggling about Big Pharma. We pay billions of dollars in corporate subsidies to not only Big Pharma, but all kinds of industries that are already making billions of dollars in profit.

So this is how it works. Your tax dollar goes to subsidize. a company that's going to use that money to create a product that then they will turn around and price gouge you with. You're paying for your own price gouging. Now, there is a law, a bill that was passed in 1980 called the Bidol bill, which gave the government marching rights. And marching rights means that if a medicine, a pharmaceutical medicine, is made with even $1 taxpayer money, which essentially is everything, practically, then the government does have the right to lower the price. But they rarely use their marching rights because they don't want

to offend Big Pharma. And years ago, the government actually gave away. They surrendered to Big Pharma the right to negotiate. So it's a form of corporate tyranny. It's economic tyranny that is being exercised. And it's our food. It's our water. It's our air. it's our workplaces, it's wars, it's everything, really to the point where people are realizing the people are going to have to step in at this point because it's how Washington's important or it's at this point. Yeah. Do you know that one of the biggest mind-blowing parts of putting Fast Like a Girl out into the world is the hundreds of thousands of 20 and 30-year-old women who have messaged us, emailed us, and have asked,

how what do I do if I don't have a cycle okay I want to just stop for one minute when when I was 20 nobody ever said they didn't have a cycle unless they had an extreme eating disorder or they were a really hardcore athlete we now have that as more of the norm than the exception and then on top of that I was talking to a friend who's an oncologist and I said to her and she does breast cancer I said, what do you seeing as far as the rates of breast cancer? Are they staying the same, going up, going down? And she goes, oh, they're skyrocketing. And my youngest patient now is 27 years old. When we look at those two statistics, something environmentally is deeply wrong. How are we going to be able to help these women? Well, listen, I'm running for president. So obviously, I believe that a

president who gets it is willing to say it is certainly a part of it. There's no one silver bowl. it, but you cannot leave the electoral process out of it. And Mindy, I've been saying in our kind of world, higher consciousness transformation, I've been saying forever, good luck with all that green juice. They're poisoning the food. They're poisoning the water. They're poisoning the air. You can't put yourself in a bubble of I only shop at Whole Foods.

It's so much bigger than that, even at Whole Foods. But at this point, these are laws. These were bad laws that were places. decent laws and we have to repeal the bad laws and put back in good ones. We have to put guardrails up. This is a form of unfettered it's called vulture capitalism.

It's a malevolent. It's beyond dysfunctional. It's moved into malfunctional. A strain of an economic system that is so soulless that no ethical, hey, we know, for instance, there was a particular pestisoth.

that had a particular kind of chemical. And it starts with, I've never been, it's almost like I can't pronounce it exactly. Oh, they're hard to pronounce. It was proven for a long time to harm a developing child's brain. Now, they finally just recently put some limits on it, but it took years because that chemical company, and we know what Monsanto does, we know about you, we know, they have such gargantuan financial power. So you and I might say, okay, we are going to show up to vote every two years or four years.

These people have corporate lobbyists in the office of our legislators every single hour of every single day. There has to be a revolution at the ballot box. You cannot leave electoral politics out of it. And no president has a magic wand. It's one of three co-equal branches of government. So it's not like if you had a president who gets this could go in there and just, with this, you know, magic wand, make it all different right away. But a president who lays it down says the truth and is not afraid of the repercussions of big pharma or big insurance companies

or big food because you're not of that system and you're just there for one term anyway, I think would be a very good idea. And that's why I'm running. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's a very rare candidate that's willing to stand up against two of the largest financial backers. for politicians. It's a very bold and brave step. And maybe they're not the largest, but they have this hold on us. And for a politician to stand up and say enough, I don't see anybody else doing that. No, you're not seeing anyone else do it. Not because they don't know what we're talking about, but because they're part of a system. And within that system, their careers are threatened. oh, somebody will primary you, or you will lose your seat on the Appropriations Committee,

it will take someone from outside. Now, they would have you think that the only people you should consider qualified are people who know how to maintain and perpetuate that system. What you and I realize is, no, it needs someone, we need someone who knows how to disrupt that system. And the most powerful disruptor at this time is somebody who just says it like it really is, who says the quiet part out loud. Because millions of people, and I want to tell you something else about this, this is not a left-right issue, not only that our health isn't,

but even the realization that these corporate powers, with their complete lack of moral centeredness or sense of ethical responsibility, are dominating our society and hurting people's lives the way they are. People on the right are waking up to this as much as people on the left, And we're really beginning to see, I think something's going on in this country, people realizing this is not left versus right. This is powerful versus powerless. This is people who with their money can cause this much damage of people's lives versus people who just feel powerless like there's nothing we can do. That's why it must be a revolution at the ballot box. Yeah. Yeah. So let's go back to this 25, 30 year old. One of the challenges that I see being down in the trenches trying to get women to change. change and men to change their health habits is that big food has sprayed so many chemicals

on food that everybody's addicted to it. So it's like when you hear, oh, wait, my favorite potato chip is causing my menstrual cycle to go away. Ooh, that's really inconvenient. And then I walk into my doctor's office and my doctor says that there's no science behind that. That's not what's going on. And so the 25, 30-year-old's really confused as to, and they even will say it's not bad that you've lost your period. You're lucky you don't have it. And it's the whole system, this is exactly what we're hearing. What about when you get pregnant? What does the doctor say about that? Yeah, right. Well, but then there's another system. There's infertility, there's a whole infertility arm of our health care that will happily take all your money to do that. And people really

that that doctor who said that probably took maybe half a year, maybe half a year in medical school of anything about food and nutrition. And you don't know much about food and nutrition, then how would you know to be horrified when you see how bastardized and poisoned it has become? Yeah, yeah. So we could go so far down the rabbit hole on the problem. And I know, you know, like you, when I actually start to pull the parts of the dysfunction of our health care system apart and the sickness and the suffering that's going on,

it moves me so deeply. I can barely function. So let's flip it. How do we, how do we, what is root cause health care? How do we change this? How do we do it from the individual and government level? Because it's got to be done from both. Well, first of all, I want to point out, as I said before, when you just said the dysfunction,

it's moved past dysfunction to malfunction. And I think that's a really important thing for us to get. Because if it's only dysfunctional, there's still the suggestion it can be fixed. Malfunctional means, no, we have to scrap what is. This business of incremental change. So what we need is for these agencies to be. cleaned out. What that means is the corporate forces that have so much control. So this is how it works. You have some big CEO of some big food company or chemical company or agricultural company,

somebody really big, whose company has paid millions of dollars and they have to do with the election of presidents and so forth. And they make it clear they'd really like this. This is the list of people that they would like to head that agency. Take note, everybody on what was just said. That's right. And that's who they choose from because it's their club, right? So you need a president who says,

I'm not going to appoint one of those people to this agency. And everybody who has a past, and there's this revolving door in Washington, that you work in Washington, then you go work in the corporation, then you come back and you work in, in government. And so if you've worked in government

and then you go work in the corporation, you can tell the corporation, well, this is how it works to get what you want. And then if you work in the corporation and you then come work in the agencies, then you say, well, this is what the companies really want. Even in our Secretary of Defense, used to be a board member at Raytheon.

Wow. So you have people from big ag and the agricultural department. We should be talking about regenerative agriculture. culture. We should be talking about poverty re-execration. You know, so many of the things that really have to do with solutions at this time don't provide short-term corporate profits. So you've got the solutions over here and the power over there. And this applies to food and nutrition as much as anything else. So you need a president who knows that she's appointing people. Those people are not welcome during this during my term, right? That we will not have the people who know about the repair work. and know about the solutions. And you know as well as I do, Mindy, not only in this area, but in every area, we have the people who understand, who stand for alternative ways of being. We don't lack that in this country. It's just that they are not invited to the seat of the table of power.

And then you have a president who proposes such things that you were mentioned, my whole health plan. My whole health plan does not just have to do with how we treat sickness, which needs to be a universal health care system like every other advanced democracy has. We have now one in four Americans living with medical debt. We have 18 million Americans who cannot afford to pay for the prescriptions their doctors give them. You were talking about that lowering life expectancy. We have 85 million Americans who are underinsured or uninsured. Now, what that means is you have a lot of people in this country whose insurance will pay for them to go to the doctor. But it will not pay for them to take the test that the doctor prescribes or to have the operation that the doctor prescribes.

or to have the operation that the doctor prescribes or take the medicine that the doctor. You know, a doctor in Detroit told me there were two doctors who said things to me that really stayed with me. One was a woman who said, when I used to diagnose a patient and say the treatment that I was prescribing,

the most common question I used to get was, what are the side effects? Today, the most common question is how much would it cost? This kind of thing is so prevalent that a cardiologist in Texas said to me, I don't even know why I'm bothering to practice medicine anymore. People come into my office. I know what's wrong. I know what to do, but the insurance won't cover it.

Right? So you're not universal repair. Also, in my plan, let's say you go to the doctor. I love this one. Let's say you go to the doctor. Now that doctor has been gone to a Western, you know, might be a very fine doctor, but really trained and, you know, mainly pharmaceutical treatment. So according to my plan, you go to the doctor.

The doctor tells you this is the medicine that I prescribe and it's pharmaceutical. Well, it is mandated by law that the doctor also has to open their computer. And for that particular sickness or condition, if there is a provenly effective non-pharmaceutical remedy, you have to be told about it. And then you get through the side. And then there are also substantial such things as gym memberships. You know, the idea, there is so much that we could do, even parks, there is so much that we could do to make sure that we are actively, proactively cultivating health. And where I'm very concerned, as I'm sure you are, has to do with early childhood.

You know, that's where a healthy body is made. That's right. Well, even on the brain, we have 90% of a child's brain is developed in the first five years. That's why I want a department of children and youth. We have to transfer resources and focus to the lives of children under 10. If you want a thriving society 10 years from now, we're going to have to pay more attention to children at the age of 10. We have hungry children in the United States. I mean, hunger right there.

which is so outrageous. But we have the highest level of poverty and child poverty in this country. What does poverty mean? Hunger. We have over 30% of Americans who now report regularly skipping meals. Well, what does hunger do to a developing child's brain? Oh, yeah. Wow.

Yeah. And maternal health, maternal health, women even while they're pregnant, you know, we have food deserts in this country where they don't even have fresh foods and vegetables. A lot of the obesity issue in children is not that they're not getting enough to eat. It's that they keep trying to eat more calories. But where are they going? They're going places where maybe they can get corn nuts. Yeah.

Yeah. Because body's just trying to get. And they're not. So all of these things, of course, produce sickness. And then, of course, society plays for it on the other end. Do you see that when we look at a preventative plan, like the doctor having to tell you of a lifestyle tool, the big picture challenge that I see with that is you're going to take these major corporations, you know, financially out? And, you know, is there a way to see preventative care as a profitable way to approach health care? since we know profits are what so many corporations are looking for.

Is there a way to even make prevention profitable? Well, I think, you know, you could look at the, you know, health food business. I mean, obviously, there are those that do. But more than that, we have, when you have one of four people living with medical debt in the society, you have an $88 billion medical debt. Meanwhile, if you take the top five pharmaceutical companies, companies. Last year alone, their profit was $80 billion. So there is such a thing as righteous profit. You and I sell books, and there's a win-win. That's one of the reasons I love the book selling.

You put in energy and get something back. Your publisher put in energy, get something back. The consumer who buys the book puts in energy and gets something back. It's a win-win. That's healthy capitalism. That's righteous profit. But when you have to have it. have one party taking so much of the profit. I mean, right now you say their profit, we're paying for it with our lives. That's right. That's right.

Yeah. So, you know what I'm saying? There's profit, and then there's profit that's actually not even profit. It's theft. Yeah. And when you were seeing the life worth out of people in order to make your profit, you know, here's your profit. Here's my life.

Right, right. So I think we have a discussion about healthy capitalism. So one thing that I've heard from a lot of doctors is that they say when I give a lifestyle choice to a patient, they don't want it. Sometimes we all know that. I mean, sometimes it's easier to pop a pill. I mean, I think we all have a little bit of that in us, you know. It's like, you know, your book, right? I called you and told me how to do the, well, it's hard, you know?

So I think that's, we're all facing that, you know, that we were brought up in a culture that was all about, well, give it to me quick and give it to me easy. And popping was part of that. And now people are recognizing. Well, but also, there's something else involved there. The lifestyle changes would be much easier if the entire society was healthier. Yeah. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. One of the things that I see in the, in food, you know, there was a beautiful, well, it wasn't really beautiful, but there was an interesting article that came out a couple years ago saying that the F is silent in the FDA, that we don't have any, a good regulation around the chemicals that are going in our food. And so, again, I'm going to come back to, and I want everybody listening to think this through,

because when you hear what Marianne's saying, to me, it's like, this is so logical. why would we not have a government that's going to bat for us to make sure that we're healthy? But then we also have to ask ourselves our favorite foods that we love and we eat over and over and over again that are sprayed with chemicals. Are we willing to give that up? Are we willing to make a change to be healthy? And I think, and I'm just offering this up to you, Marianne, that I feel like if we could get that the regulations around ingredients in food. And we could make it so that food isn't addictive.

It's not creating dopamine responses in everybody's brain. Now we have a door in to getting people to being willing to be more responsible for their lifestyle and the food changes that they make. What are your thoughts on that? Well, of course, you know, when you said that the F and the FDA has been taken out, It's like I was saying to you before, the FDA agent used to be able to say, get this off the shelves. And today they have so de-juiced the FDA. They've taken the power away from the government.

And if you try to suggest that it be put back, their PR is, oh, you're a socialist. You know, they call that big government. You know, government has a role. You know, you can drive a car, but there are traffic laws. It's understood that the government has a role in making the road safe. It's understood that there's a federal aviation. It's understood that the government has a role in making sure airplanes are safe. And there's nothing to be apologized for that we think the government has a role in making sure that food is safe.

The opponents to all this, they have their PR, which is that's overreaching government. And of course, our response to that is no, it's overreaching corporate power that's happening right now. we all know, and you would certainly know, that our taste buds get addicted, as you were saying, our brains get addicted. We all, and it takes some time, doesn't it? It takes time to sort of clear all that out and get to the point where the cherry really tastes good, the grape really tastes good. On the other hand, another factor there is how often, because of everything we're talking about,

the cherry doesn't taste that good anymore. The grape doesn't taste that good anymore. There's so much dead food in the United States, you know? So much. Yeah. It's all of the above. And I think that the most essential factor here is awareness. You know, I got stuck a few minutes ago when you were talking about the girl, the young woman, eating potato chips.

I mean, I would have thought that any woman reading your books at this point would know that's poison. Yeah. I mean, you know, that's why books such as yours are so important. And I also think if you really, there are so many things about our lives these days, that if you allow, you can't chew the whole thing at once. Yeah, it's too big. There's just lean in. Lean in. Yeah.

I have a thing for green grapes. There's something about the natural sugar in green grapes. It helps me not have a craving for bad sugar. Right? But it does take time, I think, and awareness to cultivate better habits and to release bad ones. And if we start shaming ourselves or making ourselves wrong, then obviously the change happens more slowly rather than more quickly. But one thing we must start doing is holding our government accountable. And our politicians quite simply lied to us. And some of them don't even know what's going on over the FDA. Yeah, that part is crazy. Talk to me a little bit about mental health, because I know this is another big issue that you are concerned about. And we all should be concerned about. And I want to tell you a story that I was in the UK speaking to a group at Amazon. And there was one woman who had spearheaded a whole support group for menopausal women at Amazon. And I came to speak to these women. And I came to speak to these women. And I was.

And I talked to this woman who had started the whole project or the whole support group. And she said that one of the most common times for women to leave the workforce is in her late 40s, early 50s, because the pressure and the stress is so much for a woman who is in a major hormonal transition like menopause. And what she's identified is that actually it is causing Amazon a tremendous amount of money to lose these women. And so she is trying to create support not only for the women, but to help corporations see that if you could just give her some lifestyle support, that they would actually save money. And you could take that and apply it across every corporate structure. Is there anything in your plan where if we can bring the power of lifestyle back, where corporations could see that they're actually saving money and keeping people and people are staying? healthy. Well, there are a couple ways to look at this. On one hand, you could even see this about,

you know, once you have universal health care, it would save the government money to, for not so many people to get sick. So it would be in the government's interest to, to support preventative health care and so forth. With what you were saying, good, good on her. I hope she can do it. And I would also ask you what are the particular things she's suggesting. On the other hand, something is still profoundly wrong in our society, that the only way we do something that could possibly save people's lives is to be able to prove to some big corporate entity that it would save them money. That's what it's fundamentally wrong. That's a good point. You know, money is not God. Love is God for each other. We have got to

bring more care and compassion that some things you simply don't do them because they're wrong. Yeah. Yeah. That's so well said, which takes me to mental health. And I, I want to read something that, again, moved me to tears. I don't, by the way, I don't read manifestos from politicians and get moved to tears very often. I read your root cause health plan, and I was literally like tearing up in my kitchen. I read it to my kids who are cooking in my kitchen. I was like, this is what health care should look like. And one of the, of the things that you say in here, and it's so you and so much your heart, is that it is a moral imperative that we lovingly care for one another like the human family that we are.

When we look at what's going on with health care right now, do we have too much of an individual approach to our health? And how do we bring back this idea of a loving community for forming around each other, supporting each other, because I think that's where we'll start to see some changes in mental health because people won't feel so isolated. Well, what has happened in our society is that we have stripped ourselves of some of the normal human relationships that have evolved over centuries and longer. Millennia. The presence of grandparents.

cousins, big families, time spent together, before there was television, before there was tablets. I was talking to a woman the other night. And she was talking about her son and some things that he had said. And she said, so I was worried and I'm going to send him to a therapist. And I noted in my conversation with her, the parents are so quick sometimes to talk therapists rather than parenting. Oh. I said, he's becoming a man. He's a puberty as he talked to his father.

Why don't you suggest that? And it was interesting because she said, well, you know, I told my husband that I was going to send him to a therapy. No, this was something else about her husband. I got two parts mixed up there. But the point remains the same that we talked about the importance, particularly of a boy who's growing up, to be handed, you know, the hands of the father.

I said, why don't you suggest to your husband that they go away for a weekend? Yeah. They cultivate more communication between the father and the son. You know, we've just these bonds of relationship because too many people are sending their child to a, and I'm not saying, don't send your child to a therapist. That's not what I'm saying. But it does seem sometimes that we farm out children. to the so-called experts, roles that used to be handled much more by family, by deep connectedness.

You know, just think about it. People used to have front porches. People used to come home. They used to talk to their neighbors. Kids used to go out and play. That's a large part of health. That's a large part of health fact. Kids exercising, social bonding that would take place. have to, you know, there's such a big tear in the fabric of our society, and we have to just stitch it back together. You know, I remember something that happened when my daughter was growing up. That should not have happened when I was out of town. And I remember one of my girlfriends saying, I should have just come by every day. I just was so busy. Now, when I was growing up, there was much more Mrs. Jackson and Mrs. Glassman and Mrs. Klein and Mrs. Williamson.

Everybody knew where everybody's kids were. If somebody went out of town for the weekend, the kids knew that not only are your parents looking after you, but if your parents were out of town, do you know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah. How do we bring that back? Sorry, I just, it was so well said. I'm just like, how do we bring it back? If you see the quote-unquote mental health crisis as only something to be treated on the level of symptom. This is the same thing. Level of symptom. We have to look at root cause. And it's impossible to overstate the relevance of economic factors. I'll give you an example. When I was growing up in the 1970s, the average American worker could afford a home, could afford a house, could afford a car, could afford a yearly

vacation and one parent working, the salary of one parent was enough to support a family of four and send their kids to college. Now, if one salary could do that, that men one parent, if they wished to, could be home with the kids. Today, it's only privileged an ever-shinking group of Americans where the family could afford that. Yeah, so well said. It's afford it. So, So, you know, the little things like somebody home, you know, to talk to the kid when they get home from school. And that's not to make anybody feel bad if they can't be. But it's little things. We have an economic system.

If you have 62% of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck, if you have a majority of Americans who cannot afford a $1,000 financial unexpected expenditure, that's so much chronic economic anxiety. and it's wearing people down. It's just people are worn down. This is why economics matters. Only 20% of Americans can really live with financial ease. And that's not enough. That means no middle class left. And so what happens is people don't have the bandwidth,

to really talk to their partners, talk to their kids. So, of course, everybody is living with anxiety and stress. And then we call it a mental health crisis. Well, it's a social and economic justice crisis. It's at the root so much of this. And so they jump to brain chemistry. I'm not saying brain chemistry doesn't have a role to play, but also sugar changes brain chemistry.

Yeah. And patients change is brain chemistry. There are many things that affect chemistry. Food definitely affects brain chemistry. Yeah, and one of the challenges we have with that, I think I told you the story a couple years ago, that during the pandemic, I was invited to speak, do a Zoom call with a group of teachers in South Carolina.

And the call was to be about immunity and all the things they could do to improve their immunity through lifestyle. So I gave what I thought was a brilliant presentation to them. And at the end, this very brave man raised his hand. And he said, I hear what you're saying. But if you're saying that to improve my immunity, I should buy the, the nut butter with the better oil in it, then the nut butter I am buying with the inflammatory oil in it. That is an $8 difference. And I don't have that $8. And then another woman,

these are our high school teachers, another woman says to me, I hear what you're saying, but I get up at 4 in the morning and I drive to my classroom. I get my classroom already. I leave at 4 in the afternoon. And frankly, I'm exhausted and the easiest and cheapest place for me to do, is through a fast food line. And I sat there and I realized like, they're so right. They're so right. How are we going to help that person? Well, and also it was such an awakening for you of what a privileged conversation it is that only an ever shrinking population can have easy access to health care, easy access to really healthy food, easy access to education. and so forth. That's really profound

what you said. That is just so profound. And that's why economic matters. And these are our teachers. These are our teachers. And those who often are those who do have to get work in addition to that job. We know about this. We know about how

many teachers have to out of their own pocket, buy school supplies. We're losing teachers because there's such a lack of dignity. There's such a lack of, you know, too many teachers are saying, I didn't sign up for this. I didn't sign up for this huge class where behavioral problems get in the way of my ability to actually teach, not to even mention where I could be, you know, conceivably risking my safety.

Right. The societal breakdown we're dealing with now, Mindy, is so multidimensional. And they use the word intersectionality for good reason. Everything affects everything. There's economics. There's food. There's health care. There's social justice.

You can't. And I think that. that's what people, you know, I don't think it's that Americans don't care. I know it's that Americans. It's not that we don't care, and you know that. Yeah, I agree. I think a lot of people think people are apathetic. I don't think people are apathetic. I think people are paralyzed standing in the enormity of the breakdown. And that's why we have to be willing to look at these things and at the same time, remember that we can also fix these things. Other generations have problems before us, and they face the challenge, but not if we continue to vote for people

who are part of the system that perpetuates the malfunction. Yeah. So if you're listening to this right now and hopefully people are agitated, I really hope, you know, I hate to say that because I never want to create discomfort on my podcast, but this is such an important issue that I hope people are agitated. And agitation can move you into action. So what can we do when we listen to what you're saying? And in my eyes, from what I've seen, from sitting in the health trenches with millions of people, the dysfunction or the malfunction is completely accurate that you are describing. How do we get out of this? How do what's the step out? It's so overwhelming when you put it in the totality that you just described it.

Well, it's an inside, outside approach, as they say. Outside, read people like yourself. Read people like Mark Hyman. You know, read all of the people who are writing these books, Michael Pollan, you know, Deepak Topor, every, I mean, we kind of know the people on the outside. On the inside, you know, I don't want it to be a self-serving moment, but vote for me. You know, just stop already. Just stop.

We are under a trance. We are in a trance. Thinking that the only people who are qualified to drive us out of the ditch are people who have had years of experience driving the car that drove us into the ditch. You know, the problem is not that we need more political car mechanics. The problem is we're on the wrong road. Yeah.

We don't need any other technical car. We need a visionary. and I'm not saying I'm the greatest visionary in America, but I'm the only one running for the Democratic nomination for the presidency. So I hope people will go to the website at Marianne.224.com. Get involved, financially contribute, support, volunteer, spread the word, read the root cause healing section on this. Yes, 24.com, read the whole health plan, share it with your friends.

Politics matters. You can't leave it out of the equation. because these are laws that deregulated to such an extent that companies can just, if it makes them more profit to help with your health, whether it's an insurance company. You know, we have 1.3 million people in this country who rationed their insulin. Right. That big food, that big food created a metabolic imbalance. That's exactly right.

That's exactly right. Now, in a country that has universal health care, you don't have people rationing their insulin. You know, you were talking about England. I spoke at Cambridge University a few months ago. And I remember when I mentioned people rationing their insulin, I remember how people looked at me in disbelief. What do you mean rationing their insulin? We have people in this country choosing, do I pay my rent or buy my insulin. And, you know, now they're bragging because it will be capped at $35 a month.

for seniors, people over 65. Well, first of all, not everybody who has diabetes is over 65. Yep. And secondly, if there are a lot of people, you have half of our seniors living on less than $25,000 a year. So if you're living on less than $25,000 a year and it's $35,000 a month, that matters. Most of the people, you know, I live in Washington, D.C., as you know. And when I first moved there, I remember we've all heard the line that it's a bubble. But you know, Mindy, it doesn't feel like a bubble so much as it feels like a walled city.

There are nice people there. Don't think you wrong. This is not about not nice people. But you get the feeling that once people become part of that system, they become emotionally buffered to something. Yeah. Emotionally buffered from the suffering that all of this is causing. I mean, like when you were talking about young women with the skyrocketing breast cancer, I'll tell you something else.

When I was a child, you rarely heard about someone with brain cancer. Oh, never. Yeah, never. Not anymore. Although on the other hand, strides in medicine are so great that you also hear about people living, you know, being able to recover from stage four cancers that you never heard before. So it's not about the quality of the medicine. It's about the quality of the food, the quality of lifestyle, the quality of the environment, the quality of the water.

And this will not change unless we decide as a population that this has got to stop. This is an aberrational chapter of American history has been going on for over 50 years. And if you just try to tweak it here and tweak it there, that's not going to be enough. We need to stand up revolution at the ballot box and say we're going to, we're going to, We're going to start up. We're going to start up. What do you say to the person who maybe is stuck in their party line? And they're like, this is my candidate because I'm going to vote for him because I don't want the other party's candidate going into office.

How do we approach? I hear a lot of that conversation of like, I'm sticking with this person because I don't want this person without thinking. thinking through everything that you just said. Well, I'm sure that that alludes to, I don't want to vote for Marion Williams, because I think that'll help Trump get elected. So maybe that person forgot eighth grade civics, or maybe they didn't take eighth grade civics. I don't know, but this is a primary. So you can't, I'm running for the Democratic nomination. Therefore, you can't be a spoiler in a primary. That's number one. Number two, I would point to that person and say that the president's popularity is sinking like a stone.

His approval rating is sinking so low that now Trump is defeating him in poll after poll in five out of six primary states. In fact, so is DeSantis and Nikki Haley. So I would suggest to that person that if what your real interest is in not reelecting that other person, then you might want to open your mind to a more intelligent conversation, a more critical thought. I'm not saying more intelligent, but giving more critical thought to whether or not the president is actually the strongest candidate. In a democracy, you know, the people get to decide. So that person that you just mentioned has heard from the DNC, it's got to be him. And that's not supposed to be the role of a political party.

The political party is supposed to step back and hear until the people have. weight in. But the people need to be exposed to the various candidates and what they have to say. And what happens now, you know, we're talking about, just like we have the food industrial complex and the pharmaceutical industrial complex. I'm sorry to have to tell you, there's a political media industrial complex. And once again, it's that profit driven. And so, like, for instance, in my case, a kind of invisibilization and erasure. Too many people. who have not heard me talk about these things on mainstream corporate-owned news. So people go, she's running.

I didn't know she's running. That's crazy. But I'm doing very, very well with the kids, very well with Gen Z. I'm 35%. Why? Because I can get to them on TikTok. And it's free. So it's a very corrupted system.

And money is what's going on here. Money is going on whether it's a corruption of our food supply or the corruption of our politics. It's money that is at. this point having, you know, people with tremendous capital, force of capital, that is actually overriding not only our safe, our health, our safety, our well-being, but even our democracy. And it's the people ourselves who are going to have to stand up and make this change through this revolution of the ballot box and getting involved and not being afraid to say. Couldn't agree anymore. As I started this off with you as your friend, I just want to say

Thank you for doing what you're doing and for disrupting because it can't be emotionally or physically easy on any human. And you've stepped into one of the most chaotic times in human history. So thank you for enlightening us all and stepping in. Thank you. And thank you for your support. Thank you for your encouragement. And yeah, none of us are going to achieve any of this by ourselves. This has got to be connectivity and collaboration on a level that probably most of us have not even experienced in our lifetime. But if we do rise up and we rise up together, we're going to change all this and we're going to have the deep soul satisfaction of knowing we did that.

Yeah, agreed. How do people find you and how can they get involved? And we'll leave all the links here. Thank you. Mary Ann 2024.com. M-A-N-N-E, Marianne-24.com. the first primary is less than three months away and do what you can, support, whether it's money, whether it's volunteering time, no matter where you are, you can phone bank. If you're interested

in getting involved, your heart will tell you what to do. And I so appreciate the opportunity, Mindy, to talk to you and to your audience and, you know, an idea becomes stronger when it's shared. Yes, that's, you know, I really want to point that out. And when I do the intro to, this podcast. People now listening will hear this, but I want to point out that there was so much richness in this conversation that we can now take so many pieces of it and discuss it. We could actually have a conversation about it with other people. And we are not talking about these deeper issues because people are canceling each other out. They're saying one side versus the other side, but what you just presented to us was the beginning of many conversations we can have with

friends, in our homes, with our colleagues, and so that we can start to heal together. So I just want to say thank you, because your voice and your mind is so brilliant, and I'm such a fan. Right back at you, Mindy. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. you. If you enjoyed it, we'd love to know about it, so please leave us a review, share it with your friends, and let me know what your biggest takeaway is.