The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka - 95. Calley Means: Exposing the Secrets of the Food and Healthcare Industry

Episode Date: September 10, 2024

What if the very foods we consume daily are designed to keep us hooked and sick? In this episode, Calley Means and Gary Brecka expose the shocking truth behind the food and healthcare industries, revealing how big corporations have manipulated what we eat for profit. Once dominated by cigarette companies, the food industry has used the same strategies that made cigarettes addictive to engineer ultra-processed foods that hijack our biology. Get Calley Means’s book, “Good Energy” here!: https://theultimatehuman.com/book-recs Truemed enables HSA/FSA spending on exercise, supplements, saunas and cold plunges. Learn where you can steer your tax free medical dollars: https://bit.ly/4ekjF7z Sign up for Daily email on insights from building Truemed here: https://bit.ly/3zcLMq7  For more information on Calley Means visit: https://bit.ly/3Tm0rGz  Follow Calley Means on Instagram: https://bit.ly/3AU7akp Follow Calley Means on X.com: https://bit.ly/47AZ4d3  Follow Calley Means on LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/3ZoRXlw  Follow Calley Means on Facebook: https://bit.ly/4dWvFvV   Follow Calley Means on TikTok: https://bit.ly/4glKeL9 00:00 ​Intro of Show and Guest 08:37 ​Genesis of the Tobacco Industry 10:52 ​Sugar Causing Obesity 14:52 ​Ultra-Processed Foods Hijacking Evolutionary Biology 20:40 ​Epiphany of Calley and Casey Means 31:31 ​Pharmaceutical Treadmill 40:45 ​The Interconnectedness of Body and Mental Health 44:00 ​Debatable Medical System Standards 47:15 ​Lies About Our Food and Nutrition 53:25 ​Rigged US Pharmaceutical Industry 58:58 ​Channeling Our Voice towards Politics 01:09:53 ​Nutrient Deficiency and Biomarkers 01:15:20 ​Healthy Lifestyle Choices 01:22:14 ​Healthcare System Funded by Taxpayers 01:24:57 ​Benefit Flexibility 01:34:20 ​Connect with Calley Means 01:35:35 ​Final Question: “What does it mean to you to be an Ultimate Human?” Get weekly tips from Gary Brecka on how to optimize your health and lifestyle routines: https://bit.ly/4eLDbdU PLUNGE - Use code “Ultimate” for $150 off your order of the best cold plunge & sauna in the US: https://bit.ly/3yYE3vl EIGHT SLEEP - Use code “GARY” to get $350 off Pod 4 Ultra: https://bit.ly/3WkLd6E ECHO GO PLUS HYDROGEN WATER BOTTLE: https://bit.ly/3xG0Pb8 BODY HEALTH - Use code “ULTIMATE20” for 20% OFF YOUR ORDER: http://bit.ly/4e5IjsV Discover top-rated products and exclusive deals. Shop now and elevate your everyday essentials with just a click!: https://theultimatehuman.com/amazon-recs Watch “The Ultimate Human Podcast with Gary Brecka” every Tuesday and Thursday at 9AM ET on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3RPQYX8 Follow The Ultimate Human on Instagram: https://bit.ly/3VP9JuR Follow The Ultimate Human on TikTok: https://bit.ly/3XIusTX Follow The Ultimate Human on Facebook: https://bit.ly/3Y5pPDJ Follow Gary Brecka on Instagram: https://bit.ly/3RPpnFs Follow Gary Brecka on TikTok: https://bit.ly/4coJ8fo Follow Gary Brecka on Facebook: https://bit.ly/464VA1H The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka Podcast is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute the practice of medicine, nursing or other professional health care services, including the giving of medical advice, and no doctor/patient relationship is formed. The use of information on this podcast or materials linked from this podcast is at the user’s own risk. The Content of this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Users should not disregard or delay in obtaining medical advice for any medical condition they may have and should seek the assistance of their health care professionals for any such conditions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The most profitable thing for the healthcare industry is a sick child. Can you expand upon that? As a pure economic fact, the younger someone can get and stay sick, the better. Today, in 2024, is the highest rate of childhood cancer in human history. 33% of young adults have pre-diabetes. Can you get into it? Anxiety, depression, fatigue, chronic pain, infertility. We've normalized this suffering to such a degree that people who are clearly brewing metabolic dysfunction

almost always say that they're healthy. And then the medical system conveniently says, well, people don't follow lifestyle interventions. Well, no, we have a $4.5 trillion system that's incentivizing people to get sick and then drug them. Fundamentally, ultra-processed food is designed to hijack our evolutionary biology. It's simple from the food industry standpoint. It kind of makes sense. It's make food addictive and cheap. We don't just like foods, we're addicted to them. It's mind-boggling how fast you can reverse cardiology issues and diabetes issues from food

and exercise. The further we get from the basics, the sicker we become. Part of the people listening to this are like, oh gosh, it's hopeless. And part of the people are empowered to say, I want to be a part of this change. Can you talk about some of those? Because I think it's important for the public to start to become aware that they actually do have a voice. The politics drive the policy. So before we get into policies, I just want to say...

Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Brekka, and today's guest, Callie Means, is literally going to change the world. Guys, I know I say this all the time, but I just want to come to a full stop for a moment. I don't fanboy or fangirl over many of the guests that I have on this podcast, but I am an enormous fanboy of this next guest. I have to tell you that rarely do I have the opportunity to sit down with somebody who is truly changing the world. I cannot emphasize that enough. I agree with Tucker Carlson that this man and his sister are going to truly change the face of humanity, and they are going to do it quickly in a bottom-up approach to fix our food supply. I really want you to pay attention to this podcast. It is going to be one of the most

impactful podcasts you see in your entire lifetime. Please support him. Order his book. Watch this podcast. Forward this podcast to anyone that you know. This is going to be an absolute seminar on the corruption in our food supply, the devastating effect that big pharma and big food are having on the sick and diseased population that we are continuing to promulgate in this country is an absolute pandemic. The United States is the largest spender on healthcare worldwide, and we are one of the sickest nations on the planet. I cannot say enough about my next guest, Callie Means. Callie is a former food and pharmaceutical consultant turned health advocate, and he is the co-founder of TrueMed.

This is a groundbreaking company that allows for tax-free spending on health-promoting activities and its products. He's also a New York Times bestselling author. He's currently working on an eye-opening book with his sister, Dr. Casey Means, that delves into how poor nutrition is at the root of many chronic conditions plaguing our society. Callie is here to share his incredible journey, his insights into systemic issues within our healthcare system, and innovative solutions to improve public health.

Please join me in welcoming Callie Means to the show. Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, Gary Brekka, where we go down the road of everything longevity, anti-aging, biohacking, and everything in between. And today's guest is a guest that has been on a meteoric rise. I am well familiar with his work and his book, a book that he and his sister wrote. I watched his podcast with Tucker Carlson, which is actually a must-watch podcast if you haven't seen it yet. And it resonated so deeply with me and the mission that I've been on at The Ultimate Human that I had to get this gentleman on the podcast.

So welcome, Callie Means, to The Ultimate Human podcast. I'm pumped to be here, Gary. Brother, it's so good to have you. And you and I were just eating each other's face before that. And like with a lot of my podcast guests, before they come on, we're just in the kitchen going back and forth

and eating some grass-fed steak. And, you know, what is astounding to me is that, you know, the message that I've been trying to get to the world is one that we are not as sick or diseased or as pathological as we think we are. We're very often, we're nutrient deficient. And your message and your sister's message for that matter has resonated with me so much. I think it's going to resonate so well with my audience. But for those

of my folks out there that don't know who you are, could you just give us a five minute rundown of your background? Because I find it super, super unique. I'll give the key points. I grew up in Washington, D.C. I'm sorry. Yeah, grew up in the swamp. Yeah. And it was kind of, yeah, wanted to be in the swamp.

That was my goal. I was idealistic. I wanted to contribute to U.S. public policy. So went to Stanford, studied economics, studied political science, got ready to get back to DC. The day of graduation, went on, worked on campaigns. And what was shocking was after the campaigns were over and I was on the Republican side, I was with Democrats, people across the aisle working for consulting companies at lobbying companies and everyone goes and works. For the big spenders in DC.C. and the biggest spender by far is the health care industry. They spend five times more than the oil industry. Health care.

Health care spends five times more than the oil industry. Wow. Multiples more than any other industry on public affairs, on lobbying, on influencing D.C. There's five pharmaceutical lobbyists for every member of Congress. And no matter what side of the aisle you are on. for every member of Congress. And no matter what side of the aisle you are on. For every member of Congress. Yeah. Yeah. So, so, you know, coming from a conservative background, you know, really idolizing American industry, I was really proud. I'm like, we're helping innovation. Um, and, uh, I would meet in the

morning with pharmaceutical clients and then I'd inevitably meet with the second biggest vendor in D.C., which is Big Food. And we can get back. I would think it would be Big Oil. Yeah. So food industry is about equal with oil. You know, the two most employed industries in the country are, you know, the food sector and health care is by number one. You know, the fastest growing industry right now in America, it's not AI. It's not tech.

It's actually health care. Health care is the largest and fastest growing industry right now in America. It's not AI. It's not tech. It's actually healthcare. Healthcare is the largest and fastest growing industry in the country. And what I pieced together later, unlike the tech industry or the tech industry at its best, for each marginal dollar we spend, we're getting worse outcomes. We're dying earlier and have more disease. So it took me a while to piece those together. I was very proud to work for these industries, even doing questionable things. I mean, my first client working for the healthcare industry was opioids. It was 2011. And people were coming down in the opioid crisis. And I was shocked. As a junior employee, I had lists of Harvard and Stanford professors. And we funneled the money. And, um, you know, we couched it in terms of, Oh, we're going to give, uh, Stanford and the Dean of Stanford, who's a pain specialist, uh, Dr. Philip Pizzo was his name at the time. Uh, we're going to give them, uh, you know, from Pfizer and other, other pharmaceutical companies, some grants and some, some personal consulting payments and, and get to the right answer.

Um, so we, uh, we worked and had a strategy from a, from a lobbying office in Washington, DC to funnel millions of dollars to the Dean of stanford med school and uh other prominent professors and then um surprisingly uh that dean was appointed the nih panel to write the definitive report on um on opioids and he was chosen you know you can't have a more prestigious person there's can't get higher than that the dean of stanford med school and he appointed the majority of that panel, other folks that we paid, and they said the addiction claims were overblown. And today, 75% of the opioid crisis that we hear about, those addictions started with a legal prescription. The fentanyl and all these other issues. Most people that die of an opioid overdose today, a fentanyl overdose, anicit drugs actually started with a legal prescription. So those donations, kind of piecing it together, had very disastrous

consequences. And then working for the food industry, it's simple from the food industry standpoint. It kind of makes sense. It's make food addictive and cheap. Yeah. I've heard you talk about the genesis of, and if you would back it up a little bit, I've heard you talk about the genesis of the tobacco industry, their acquisitions of food companies, and the shift of the staffing that actually created one of the most addictive compounds in America in world history, shifting their focus to food. How did that happen? Yeah. So my public affairs firm that I worked was working at the time actually was the really the uh, the architect of the cigarette, uh, industry strategy in the seventies and eighties. And, um, what happened was, uh, in the 1980s, too late,

decades too late, but finally, finally the government and the science, not even the government, the scientific authorities said there's harm to cigarette smoking. That's key. Forget any command and control regulation. The scientific authorities, my PR firm, right, we bought off the scientists in the 60s, 70s, and 80s to basically delay. And you had in the 70s doctors saying smoking was healthy. That was kind of the scientific consensus. So in the 1980s, finally, at long last, the Surgeon General said smoking can be harmful. But Philip Morris and R. finally, at long last, the Surgeon General really said smoking can be harmful. But Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds were two of the largest companies in the world. When

you looked at the most valuable, highest market cap companies, it wasn't like Google, Microsoft, all the tech companies today. It was like cigarette companies. They were two of the 10 largest companies in the world. And they had the highest balance sheets, the highest cash piles of any company in human history. So as smoking was declining. They still had this massive cash pile. And the two largest M&A deals up until 1990 were cigarette companies buying food companies. So you have the movie Wall Street and all this M&A activity in the 1980s. The biggest deals were cigarette companies buying food companies. You know, the definitive book on this era, Bob Rainer's At The Gate about KKR was Nabisco's

acquisition by R.J. Reynolds. So that happened. And then Philip Morris's acquisition by R.J. Reynolds. So that happened. And then Philip Morris bought Kraft, U.S. Foods. So by 1990, the two largest food companies in the world, by far, were cigarette companies. And what they did is they shifted two things over. They shifted the thousands of scientists. So cigarette companies were one of the largest employees of scientists, the highest payers of scientists. They had the best scientists in the world making cigarettes addictive. So they shifted the addiction specialists thousands by the

thousands over to the food department. And the second thing they did is they used the playbook from the lobbying and public affairs, and they shifted that from cigarettes to food. So what happened? The cigarette industry paid Harvard. They created the Sugar Research Council and funded a bunch of research saying that sugar doesn't cause obesity. And that was the foundation of this Harvard research. Again, how can you have something more prominent than a study from Harvard? The Harvard research was the cited basis and underpinning of the food pyramid. So the disastrous food pyramid that we all know about, that by the way, the USDA forced other countries to adopt

to do research funding and nutrition research funding with us. So the entire developed world was basically coerced through our corrupt system to endorse the food pyramid in 1992, shifted a huge part of the American diet, you know, from animal-based fats, you know, it demonized those and shifted them to carbs and shifted them to sugar. And we all remember the food. I remember this. I mean, I graduated high school. I'm dating myself here in 1988.

And that was about the time that I was going into college. And I remember myself walking down the, you know, the processed food aisle and looking for the lowest fat items that you could find. Right. My parents switched from vitamin D milk, and we grew up on a farm, to skim milk. We started doing the white bagels, Wonder Bread. And you're right. I mean, the big data screams in the face of that kind of research, because if you overlay the incidence of obesity, type 2 diabetes, multiple chronic illnesses in the face of that kind of research. Because if you overlay the incidence of obesity,

type 2 diabetes, multiple chronic illnesses in the same biome, the skyrocketing rates of autism and everything else, you know, you think, what all of a sudden caused this to balloon like that? I mean, I heard your sister quote a statistic the other day that i found fascinating that in 1950 um one percent of the population um was pre-diabetic um and now it's 50 i mean that is that is just astounding to me so so they they acquire these food companies they switch the the researchers you know there's there's interesting research that i've read about um the compulsion for certain artificial sweeteners to actually trigger dopamine releases so that you actually do create that addictive cycle, right? Similar to cigarettes, right?

There's a receptor on the back of the tongue. I think it's called the RF1A2 receptor. And that receptor is specifically sensitive to certain artificial sweeteners and sugars. And when it gets dinged, it gives you a dopamine reward, which is like a drug, right? I mean, it's like, there's your reward, bing, you know, you get a little emotional boost. So now we don't just like foods, we're addicted to them. Want to get an extra hour of quality, good sleep every single night? Let me tell you how I do it. My wife and I sleep on Eight Sleeps Pod 4 Ultra. This is a technology

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What you just described, nobody understood that better than these scientists. And we kind of just assume, oh, you know, the food industry, all these industries have our interests at heart. And we get a lot into motivations. I mean, these aren't, I think some of the people are evil, but these aren't fundamentally evil people.

But they do have a bottom line. They did, you know, use billions of dollars of debt to buy these companies and need to return money to shareholders. And that this fundamental insight about the idea of ultra processed food being able to hijack our biology, you know, we get lost in these studies and, you know, the evidence-based, you know, which is very important, but like, but like we can get lost in the weeds. Fundamentally, ultra processed food is designed to hijack our evolutionary biology. You know, when we were eating grass fed steak in there, you can't really overeat that, you know, there aren't animals in the wild, um, that have, you know, chronic obesity and diabetes rates. It's, it's only us. Um, and the difference we have with animals in the wild is ultra processed food.

And the point I'm trying to add to this discussion is that was really, really intentional. Not figuratively, literally tobacco industry scientists and tobacco industry lobbyists. And you look at cancer rates in 1985 or so when the Surgeon General started coming down on smoking, they've exploded. They're up like 8x. And today in 2024 is the highest rate of childhood cancer in human history. Childhood cancer. Childhood cancer. It's exploded. The New York Times recently had a front page article saying cancer rates are exploding among kids. Nobody knows why. Nobody knows why. Now, I know what's interesting about your animal analogy too, is that if you actually take animals out of the wild and put them in captivity,

you actually do start to see chronic disease, obesity, diabetic animals, depression. When you feed cattle soybean, they become pre-diabetic and actually diabetic. And I actually read a really terrible article on commercial cattle farming where, you know, a lot of these cattle are dying of type 2 diabetes at the time that they're slaughtered, where the grass-fed cattle are not. And the amount of stress hormones and cortisol that's circulating in their blood and they're, you know, they're fearful and they're, you know, they're not eating in're natural environment. Yeah. Their cortisol is so high in the stress hormone that gets into the meat. Um, yeah, no, it's, it's, it's a, it's a great point. And, um, you know, Casey,

I talk about in the book, um, if you had two glasses of water and one had arsenic in it, you'd be able to understand that we can differentiate the components of, of something, but with food, we have this mental lapse where we just see it all as the same. And we dive into this really specifically with the difference between a industrial farmed GMO grain fed cow and a cow out in the wild grass fed in the sun. The genetic, the omega-3 to omega-6 profile is entirely different. It's reversed. That cow, you know, the industrial raised one is much more inflammatory, has much more cortisol, you know, just fundamentally that's making the genetic makeup of what we're eating and has profound effects. You know, you take something like and put beyond meat or some fake meat,

you know, and we see that as healthy and that's been advertised to us as healthy. 80 ingredients in that thing. You just look at the ingredients, look at the components. That is the key thing. Look at the components to how this animal is made. We talk a lot about, and we've talked about some politicians who've been talking about this,

where have all these allergies come from? Where have all these lactose intolerance, gluten allergies, these weren't a thing. These weren't a thing. And it's not milk is the problem. It's not gluten necessarily is even the problem. It's what's being done to that food. And we just have a real hard time understanding that.

And that's just, I think, a mental, moral, almost blind spot. Again, when the food was able to be taken away from us, and in 1990, the ultra-processed food percentage of the American diet was much, much lower. Today, for a kid, it's about 70%. 70% ultra-processed food percentage of the American diet was much, much lower. Today, for a kid, it's about 70%. 70% ultra-processed food. 70% food that is a science experiment. I just cannot express it enough. You have a science experiment from tobacco scientists. The food industry still to this day is one of the largest employees and the best-paying employer of scientists.

And they're not there to you know, to do unbiased research. The real criminal aspect of letting the cigarette industry buy food companies is, is now they're able to market to kids. Now their target market is a hundred percent of people. And they've been able to buy off the USDA, the NIH, the FDA, the food and drug administration, um, in order to push this product on kids. We truly would be healthier if the cigarette industry went back to making cigarettes. I mean, it's laughable, but it's not. It's a sinister laugh.

I mean, it's, you know, what's also astounding to me, too, is that, you know, well, first of all, I think that COVID may have done the whole world a favor in that I think it rattled the foundational trust of humanity in the elites to be. And I think for the first time, maybe in modern history, people are looking at this elitism and saying, maybe the government doesn't have my best interests at heart. And I don't actually think that there is a, you know, like senators out there and people running for Congress that are like, we're going to increase the rates of childhood obesity in children. We're going to drive up cancer rates in children.

I don't think it's that conscious. I think that the machinery has been architected in a way that we just make so much money off of disease. And there's just so many billions of dollars. I mean, type 2 diabetes is $110 billion industry in America. I mean, I don't think anybody's sitting in a boardroom right now saying, hey, Stan, how do we shut that down, right?

How do we get this 110 billion off the balance sheet? Let's just figure out a way to manage it. And then when you look at most of the profiteering in the medical industry, it is from the management of disease, from the maintenance of symptoms. And it's like, well, we're just going to take the symptoms that you have right now and we'll just maintain them over your lifetime. But the trade off is they won't get worse. But you know, what does get worse is all of the things that are the side effects of those symptoms. And so that's why I think your background is so interesting

because you came from a lobbying perspective and it's similar to you, like your sister's epiphany. Like when was the epiphany for you? Yeah. Like what was the typical? Yeah. So I hate to admit it, but, you know, I got out of this world more than a decade ago and I didn't fully put the pieces together. So I had a couple of life events. One was my sister.

So, again, you know, we kind of were just, you know, conditioned to rise up the traditional ladders. And Casey was the star of the family. You guys climbed the highest educational ladders. I mean, the most respected ladders, arguably, in the world. That's what we thought success was. And Casey was the real star. I mean, you know, she, president of her Stanford undergrad class, went straight to Stanford med school, top, top of her Stanford medical school class, her choice of residencies, did head and neck surgery, top performing resident in her head and neck surgery, had done, you know, hundreds and hundreds of sinusitis surgeries, which is where somebody has such inflammation

their size as you're passing them out, cutting out the remnants of the inflammation. My daughter literally just had that. It's epidemic right now. So everyone's, so Casey in her fifth year of residency, and we talked about this in the book, had a kind of out-of-body experience where it's just all these inflammation conditions are exploding. It's really, she really is an inflammation doctor and she's doing her third sinusitis of the day. Somebody is passed out. She's got their sinuses cut open. And she has this realization that she did not know why that person has inflammation. And she's like, am I the idiot?

Did I not learn this? And then she goes back to her Stanford medical school training. And not once did she learn what causes inflammation. She actually realized that she didn't take one nutrition class and 80% of medical schools do not require a single nutrition class. She then unwound it a little bit more and realized more than 50% of Stanford medical schools and Harvard medical schools funding comes from pharma. She then realized that 90% of her entire course load was on pharmacology. So there's this invisible hand. There's an invisible hand that is training doctors, right? That medicine, that serious

medicine only kicks in once a patient is sick. Her first week of medical school at Stanford, the dean said, essentially the American patients are lazy, that they're going to eat their Big Macs and their Big Gulps, and they're going to eat their Big Macs and their big gulps, and they're going to be sedentary. And the best we can do is stand here heroically with our scalpel and our prescription pad to practice serious medicine. When Casey, after sinusitis surgery, mentioned some dietary interventions because she looked at the patient's chart and realized that that patient has seen seven other specialties, which she's never talked to. That patient had diabetes. That patient was battling obesity. The patient was battling, obviously, seeing her cardiologist. That patient

had depression. The patient had all these other issues. Casey had never spoken to all those other doctors, all siloed treatments. And she mentioned a dietary intervention. She read something on PubMed and she was reprimanded by her attending surgeon. And the attending surgeon said, we didn't go to nutrition school. Okay, we practice serious medicine here. Yeah, this is serious. We cut them open. Yeah.

And that really awoken me. So Casey bravely left the system. She put down her scalpel. She said, I need to figure out why people are getting sick. She was nine years in, if I remember. Yeah. That's absolutely right. And hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt and societal expectations.

I mean, our system is taking the best and the brightest. And then we saddle them. But she looked around the hospital. Every doctor realizes what's going on. They feel trapped. Doctors have the highest suicide rate of any profession in America, highest burnout rate. You know this. If you're on a missionary zeal to do something that you really believe in and working

really hard, you don't have to make depression rates. The number one killer of cardiologists is cardiovascular disease. It's oxymoronic. Exactly. But if you're working hard and feeling like you're in a trapped system, she saw that every doctor around her says behind closed doors that they feel trapped. They know patients aren't getting better. We have the biggest decline in life expectancy in American history since 1860 right now. Rates of every single chronic condition is going up as we're spending more to treat them. In 2024, it's the highest rates in American history of heart disease, cancer, autoimmune conditions, autism.

Go down the list. Kidney disease. Every single condition is going up all at once, particularly among kids. And as we spend more to treat it. So she realized that that doctors realized that she stepped away and went on a on a real journey to understand what's what's causing people to be sick and that helped me uh really crystallized by our mom's son of death of that whether your parents i said she was an idiot because so so so so so so so i screamed at her so we didn't how dare you with the family name?

So we didn't speak for a year. Really? I, it was, it was very, very, I think this was 2017. I called her and I just finished Harvard business school. I'm kind of all, okay, this is, you know, I'm doing an e-commerce startup. I haven't been awakened yet. And I said, you're being an idiot. You're, you're disgracing yourself and the family.

I said that essentially. My parents were extremely supportive. Um, and, uh, although we really had this, for some reason, embedded trauma to just climb up the ranks. My parents have always, I don't know, but it's, it's not my parents' fault. My parents were really, uh, they threw her a party when she left medical school. I called them. I'm like, she's being an idiot. She's, this is disgrace. So they said, she'll figure it out. I know she will, but she had no plan. She just had to get away. And she has that kind of moral courage. And she just started seeing people flocked her. She just started posting stuff. I'm like, what are you doing? Posting recipes and stuff about food on Instagram.

And she had hundreds of people start reaching out to her and she started her own practice to help people get to the root cause. There's a clamoring for this. There's so much pain out there. So what really, and my sister and I really vowed to make this our life's mission and where it really came together for me is in 2021, my mom was taking a hike, felt a pain in her stomach, went into Stanford hospital, got a scan, get to text the next day, stage four pancreatic cancer. She was, we thought she was perfectly healthy. She called me that night and she said, I'm going to die in the next couple of weeks and I'm not going to be able to meet my future grandkids. And we raced to her side and we went to Stanford hospital, top on college in the world. And they, uh, said to Casey, uh, that this was unlucky and a tough break.

And my sister, you know, looks at my mom's charts and she's been on chronic disease medications for 40 years. She's the standard American patient. And this is, it's not about my mom. This is for everyone watching. The standard American patient is on that statin, which my mom was on, is on that metformin for high blood sugar, is on that

ACE inhibitor for high blood pressure. The definitions of metabolic dysfunction, right? Right. Obesity, cholesterol. Triglycerides. Yeah, triglycerides. Exactly. Insulin resistance. Blood pressure. Yeah. She was on a medication for all five, right? And the standard American patient is. You literally take the definitions of metabolic dysfunction.

We're drugging it at every single appointment over those 40-year curve. Oh, it's pre-diabetes. It's a pre-disease. Most people your age are on the metformin. Oh, a statin is the most prescribed drug in the world. This is normal. It's very preventative. No problem.

ACE and HIPAA. Oh, your blood pressure is a little high. Take this. Not one warning sign. And what was so clear as we buried my mom is that she was a casualty of the system. She was the person who thought it was correct to be eating the carbs and eating the processed food from the food pyramid. We were really conscientious about food, but she was following the guidelines. She was a good American patient, and she was let down, and the majority of Americans are being let down because they're listening to the system. And the big radicalizing point, again, after my mom died, we decided to write this book

in the days after death and decided to make this our life's mission. This is a must read. We both have startups and just started advocating. A key message I have, and Gary, you're a warrior on this, is you really need to trust yourself on chronic conditions. If you have an acute issue that's going to kill you right away, an infection or a complicated childbirth or something, go to the hospital. But we have been totally let down, totally let down on chronic conditions. It's been completely co-opted, and it's much actually more simple. We have more empowerment than people have been led to believe.

The second we started trying to medicalize chronic conditions, that's when things went off. Casey, at the end of Stanford Med School, had to choose between 42 specialties. We've siloed the body to where my mom was seeing five different specialists for all those conditions, the cardiologist, the endocrinologist, all the things. It's the same route.

We are being lied to that chronic conditions that are, that are to your point, taking up 95% of medical costs, 95% of medical costs are chronic. Four and a half trillion dollars a year. Broken bones. And, and, you know, all these things that you think that are good to go a lot, that's 5%. Yeah. 5%. So, so, so that's what we need to rethink. And that's what we're on the mission to do. And I'm very optimistic. I think people are waking up. And I think COVID was a big part of it.

I'm optimistic too because folks like you are actually bringing to light not just the corruption but actually the real pandemic. And it's a pandemic of chronic disease. And I think that people have accepted such an erosion of their baseline sense of normalcy that this is normal. You start wearing readers in your late forties, your early fifties, you start on cardiovascular medication. When you get into your early fifties and your late forties, you start managing your blood pressure with a glucofage. And it's just what, and, and, and it's so normalized because everyone, your age is doing the same thing, right? I mean, my parents are the same way. I mean, my dad's a Navy captain. My former Navy captain, my mom was flight attendant. We grew up very, very middle class. But I, you know, looking back, I see that, you know, she had a little bit of low thyroid. So

then she started Synthroid. And then after Synthroid, she started Enderol for beta blocker. And then, you know, the chronic inflammatory conditions, they started her on a blood thinner. So then she was taking, forget what the blood thinner was, but she was taking a blood thinner, heparin. And then all of a sudden she started getting really, really severe joint pain. So they put her on a corticosteroid. And, you know, I know now, especially from the research in the mortality space, the corticosteroids actually, you know, initially knocked down the inflammation, but then they ate the joint like a termite.

So she had bilateral knee replacements. And this is mama Brecca. And, and, you know, 10 years ago, when I started this journey, I mean, by the grace of God, both of my parents are still alive and they're, they're thriving given, given their backgrounds now. And, you know, I thank God for every day I get to spend with them, but they, but it's the very same thing, you know, you know, my dad was under the military care. My mom had really good health insurance through Delta Airlines. She worked for the airline for 30 years. Um, but just on the big pharma treadmill, just, just they,

they got on that wheel, um, early and it just progressed and progressed and progressed. My mom's weight ballooned and then she had bilateral knee replacements. Then they didn't get out of bed for 45 days and then her cognitive function declined and then they're like oh you have early onset this early onset that and it was like i i was like enough all right this is crazy and and you know we've revamped their diet i have them getting in sauna because they're deconditioned i'm getting in sauna breathing oxygen doing multi-step oxygen therapy taking some peptides, supplementing with some basic minerals, amino acids, omega-3 fatty acids.

It is astounding how much different my parents are today than they were 10 years ago when they're 10 years older. And I think so many people that are watching this know that there is this treadmill and you guys call it the, I forget what you call it. The pharmaceutical treadmill. Yeah, the pharmaceutical treadmill. Yeah, yeah. I love that analogy because the crazy thing is they drop babies on this day one.

They're out of the womb and 15 minutes later, they're on the treadmill. And I'd love for you to talk about that a little bit because I think this is what, They're out of the womb, and 15 minutes later, they're on the treadmill. And I'd love for you to talk about that a little bit because I think this is what – one of the things I've heard you say in the past, it was just a statement of fact, which I like. You weren't attacking any particular industry. It was just a statement of fact. You said the most profitable thing for the healthcare industry is a sick child. And you just let that resonate for a second. The most profitable thing for the healthcare industry is a sick child.

Can you expand upon that? Yeah. Again, I want this to be really clear. Let's get out of the conspiratorial realm. Yes, absolutely. And just like, I want everyone, that's a charge statement, but I want everyone to just think

about a pharmaceutical executive. I know many. Many of my friends work at pharmaceutical companies. Yeah, and I don't think they're evil either. But they are going to get fired if growth doesn't happen. So I just want everyone to just think about this and think about what drives growth. 95% of medical spending is on interventions once people are sick. As a pure economic fact, the younger someone can get and

stay sick, the better. Financially. Financially. Yeah. And while working for the pharmaceutical industries, we really aggressively lobbied to get more vaccines on the schedule, just as a simple statement. And once you're on the schedule, you're mandated for every single child to take it. You're basically not able to go to school, not able to do a lot of things if you take it. And there was a big issue with the hepatitis B vaccine, which was actually an STD. You can only get it basically later in life or intravenous needles. And we lobbied heavily to have that first day of life. So in the first hours of life,

a child is basically mandated to get an injection for an STD. Now, I'm not saying this drug actually isn't good in many cases. If the mom has hepatitis B, which they test for, you should have it. But this just as a statement of fact is transferred through sex or intravenous needles, and there was an aggressive, I saw it, aggressive lobbying from the pharmaceutical company because they need to make the return. And once you get on the schedule. So that's just an interesting example that you're almost normalized from the first moment of life that a pharmaceutical intervention, that there's something wrong with you from coming

into this world. Then you look at kids, as you mentioned. Diabetes wasn't a thing a generation ago. A person, a doctor that treats diabetes wouldn't see a diabetic child in their career. Today, 33% of young adults have prediabetes. That is insane. Staten rates, metformin rates have doubled in the past five years among high schoolers. Antidepressants, you talk to any parent of a high schooler, are prescribed like candy. Getting to adult women, 25% of adult women are on some kind of psychiatric drug that starts really in high school right now. 25% of the world. Yeah, it's the most prescribed drug in the country. Now, the Academy of Pediatrics,

when I was a lobbyist pushing for food you know, food stamp funding for soda, it's the number one item on food stamps and, you know, school lunches still have no sugar guidelines and agriculture subsidies all go to ultra processed food that are poisoning our kids. Not a statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics, which sets the standard of care on those issues. They're predominantly funded by formula makers, processed food makers and pharma. And now we're saying that 12 year olds first line at events, they literally say, not wait and see if a 12-year-old is overweight or obese, ozempic, for life. Overweight or obese, that's 50%.

And it's, just to be really clear, even if they're pre-obese, GLP-1s, for life. So you, just for all parents, if your child is a little bit distracted, sitting in a sedentary room, eating ultra-processed food, low sunlight, any animal child is a little bit distracted, sitting in a sedentary room, eating ultra processed food, low sunlight, any animal would be a little bit distracted. It's Adderall, of course. Yeah.

If they're a little bit sad, they're getting an SSRI. If they have slightly high cholesterol, stand for life. If they have slightly high blood sugar, which again is more than 33% of young adults, metformin, skyrocketing. And now you as a parent are going to be told that you're going against the science if you don't accept an ozempic prescription for your child. That is mind-numbing. So the problem here is twofold. You hit on it, the treadmill and the whack-a-mole.

There was recently a psychiatry conference about the impact of SSRIs and GLP-1s. And people were actually very happy because actually SSRI and ozempic rates are tied together. So just get this. When you take SSRIs, which now a bunch of kids are on, that's antidepressants, one of the key side effects, listed side effects, is weight gain. Right. So now psychiatrists— And lethargy, which actually furthers weight gain.

Yeah. Yeah. So there's big conferences now where psychiatrists are prescribing GLP-1s with the SSRIs preemptively. Now, what's one of the top side effects of Ozempic? Depression and suicidal ideation. So the EU is launching a big investigation into increased suicidal ideation into GLP-1s. This is actually very concerning. It makes sense because the GLP-1s disrupt your gut and microbiome, which produces 95% of your serotonin. And this makes a lot of sense. So there's actually – it's a whack-a-mole because you actually have to do the Ozempic because of the SSRIs. And then the Ozempic is causing people

to need to up their dose of SSRIs. So that's the type of train we're getting on. And the most criminal part of all of this, and I think why public policy and parents and anything that defines this, is that when a child is told that their cholesterol is a statin deficiency, or they're told they're slightly being overweight is an Ozempic deficiency, or told that their cholesterol is a statin deficiency, or they're told they're slightly being overweight is an ozempic deficiency, or told that their blood sugar is a metformin deficiency, or told that the fact that they're a little bit sad, you know, is an SSRI deficiency, that's a lie. And what you're doing is robbing that child of actually, I think the core thing they need for spirituality, for a thriving life, for happiness. It's just an understanding

of the interconnectedness of their body and metabolic health. And that's why I think we're actually in kind of this spiritual crisis where we're told, okay, ultra processed food is fine. We're completely divorced from the soil. We're completely divorced from the fact that food today is, you know, by some measures, 50, 60, 70% less nutrient dense than it was a generation ago or two generations ago because of our soil depletion. Trust the industry, trust the science on this crap we're putting on our body. Then, okay, there's a cure for everything. There's a pill for everything. We can just poison ourselves and then cure it. That's what innovation is. That's what science is telling us. And then we're losing, we're robbing that child of an understanding of how movement, of how sunlight,

of how food, of how sleep, of how just basic biological needs impact. And if a child, if a child doesn't understand that they're gonna live a less suboptimal life, does anyone think because they don't feel empowered, like they don't realize that I can actually take choices into my own hands that could have a material impact on, on the trajectory of my life, you know, I, I could actually be less fat if I moved more. And, and if I moved more, I would actually feel better. And if I felt better, I would actually be more engaging. And it's almost like the hub of the wheel, right? It's, it's, you know, I talk about this all the time, you know, all these, I just did a post on Instagram and I, I, um,

I put a 20 pound rucksack on and I went for like a couple hour walk in the woods. And when I was coming back from this walk, I felt so amazing. And, and, and, and I sort of threw myself under the bus and I was like, you know, I have all this fancy equipment in Miami. I got red light beds and I got hyperbaric chamber and I got, you know, cold plunges and, and, and all this stuff. Right. And, you know, costs a lot of money. And this like few hour walk that I did in the woods,

I really just tapped in and I was like, this is the best I have felt in a long time. And I'm very in touch with like, you know, how I feel and how I sleep and how I wake up. I was looking at my sleep scores at, you know, when I was sleeping at 10,000 feet, they were through the roof. Just in that short period of time.

And I think the more disconnected we get from nature, and the more, the further we get from the basics, you know, the sicker we become. You know, you look at the number of sunscreens that have been pulled from the market for causing cancer, and yet the villain is this, you know, we vilified the sun. And, you know, we've vilified grounding, exercise, sunlight, movement, you know, we've, we've vilified grounding exercise, sunlight, um, movement, you know, there, there, there's some really interesting studies recently on, on exercise, actually outpacing the results of, uh, depression, you know, uh, versus exercise versus SSRIs. But we, I guess there's no money in that. And, and, and when you're telling me is there's even, it's even worse.

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Trust me, you don't want to miss this. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human podcast. Yeah, and where I really try to play on this is like a systemic public policy level. I really do think Americans and humans have an evolutionary desire to thrive, to be healthy, to not poison their kids. And I really do trust people that they want to be healthy. And I think you just look at what's happening in America, where we're like three times more diabetic than Italians. I don't think we're like less, are we like that much more lazier than Italians? I think there's like something happening. So what I really go to when you're talking is,

I just think the standard of care in our medical system is wrong. Like we should just expect the medical system when somebody is depressed to give the correct medical advice. Now, sometimes that might be an involved drugs. I'm not fully anti-drug, but it's just wrong when a child, 80% of their diet is ultra-processed food. Children are so sedentary right now that 77% of 21-year-olds aren't eligible to join the military, right? 77%? It's a national security crisis.

77% of young adults aren't eligible to join the military. So you have a child, they're being forced fed ultra processed food. Our schools, we sit them and they listen to... We should eat out of the curriculum too. Yeah, they're not moving. They're sedentary. They're in a sunless room. They've got a weapon of mass destruction for chronic stress in their pocket. Children are sleeping two hours less than they did a hundred years ago. Matthew Walker talks about this. The school times are actually criminal. It's totally against a child's circadian rhythm how early we started. So we've basically taken every pillar of their metabolic health, and it's destroyed to an unprecedented level. And it's just not medically

accurate for a doctor to see that kid for five minutes and just immediately prescribe them a drug that kind of mellows them and mellows them out. It's just not the right medical intervention. And then the medical system conveniently says, well, people don't follow lifestyle interventions. Well, no, we have a $4.5 trillion system that's incentivizing people to get sick and then drug them. Like if doctors actually said the truth and the correct standard of care, let's look at, and you were talking before

we went on, just how it's mind boggling how fast you can reverse cardiology issues and diabetes issues. These are reversible conditions from food and exercise. I always go back to COVID you mentioned. I mean, if this was a warning sign for our immune system and metabolic health, we were dying multiples times more at higher rates than other countries. And if the Secretary of Defense and Secretary of the Treasury, because we're going bankrupt and all the medical leaders stood in unison in April 2020 and said, this is a real warning sign for our immune systems and our metabolic health. And we need to harden up a little bit and we need to shift medical incentives and shift medical guidelines, you know, not forcing anyone to eat

or do anything, but incentivizing it and recommending it. Again, when people, when the food permit came out, we followed that. When these smoking guidelines came out, we followed that. When Dr. Fauci said to take certain pharmaceutical products, we followed that. 90% of people did. We listened to medical leaders. And I think this idea and this gaslighting that we have that like, you know, if there was a resounding, you know, in unison from the Dean of Harvard Med School, the head of the NIH to the head of the FDA saying that we have the paradigm for chronic disease wrong. And, you know, the intervention for diabetes, the head of the NIH, to the head of the FDA, saying that we have the paradigm for chronic disease wrong, and the intervention for diabetes, the intervention for PCOS and infertility. We have millions and millions of women, most of my friends, they're struggling

with PCOS. It's skyrocketing. It's pills, hormones, up until an intervention. IVF is a miracle. Great. But it's an invasive, gruesome procedure. And I think a lot of women would like to know that PCOS is insulin resistance and can be reversed often very quickly before going up, you know, and messing with your hormones and doing invasive surgical procedures. But those are much more expensive. We just need the standard of care. And we need to attack the incentive of every single level of the medical system profiting from people being sick. That is the simple economic fact. Pharma companies,

hospitals, even insurance companies profit from people being sick. Premiums have risen 100% in the past 10 years. The largest source of inflation in America right now is healthcare inflation. That is because insurance companies can only make 15% profit margin by law, but they're able to raise premiums. So what does that mean? That means they want to take 15% of a bigger pie. And that's what's happened. They have no cost controls. They're able to raise premiums every single year. And what is raised cost means? That means more people getting sick. Fundamentally, every single industry that touches our health wants more people to get sick for longer periods of time.

Unless we're attacking that incentive, which some politicians we should be very, I think, complimentary of this are finally talking about, unless we touch that incentive, nothing else matters. Yeah, and I think unless we make it politically unpopular to support, you know, then it will continue. Right. And I think when Americans rise up and the world rises up and they realize that the pandemic of chronic disease is something that is preventable and that we really have been lied to about our food supplies. And we've been told that glyphosates are safe and pesticides and herbicides and insecticides and preservatives.

You know, I remember my mom telling me that when she grew up, her mother used to have to go to the grocery store every day. Right. Like, so she went and got fish or she went and got bread or she went and got eggs or, you know, every single day because stuff rotted. And now you can stick a piece of fruit on your counter for 30 days and, and, and eat it. It's not even food. It's like when we embalm bodies, those, those bodies aren't living, they're preserved. When we preserve food, it's not living, it's just preserved.

And, and there is a way for us to not incentivize, in my opinion, from the top down, but from the bottom up where we, we should be incentivizing sustainable, healthy agriculture and putting nutrients back into the soil. I think if you trace 99% of human nutrition, it will come back to the soil, right? I mean, because the plants that grow in the soil that we either eat or that animals eat either have or lack the nutrition that they need to manifest the kind of nutrition that when we eat them, we're not what we eat, we're what we eat eat. And you look at genetically modified foods and the impetus to try to increase yield and not increase nutrition, right? None of these agricultural farmers are saying, hey, how do we improve the nutritional content of our wheat,

soy, dairy, corn, blueberries, bananas? They're saying, how do we increase the yield? Well, what you do is you make it genetically resistant to glyphosates, poisons, and you get rid of all the pests. And I have a very good friend that's a farmer, Alfie Oaks, and he has an organic farm, thousands of acres of organic farming. He said, there are some farms in the state of Florida that have been spraying their crops with pesticides and herbicides and insecticides for so long that there are no more pests around. Like there's not a white fly for 300 miles, but you know what they do? Spray it again the next year, right? And there's not even the necessity

for it because they have poisoned the environment so much that the pests that they were trying to stop from eating the crops are actually no longer pests. It's like the species is extinct, but we're still trying to kill the species. And the thing that I love so much about your message is that it's not just one of fear mongering. You know, it's very fact based. You know, you're not saying that there's, you know, some, you know, evil wizard behind the curtain that's saying let's, you know, make more children sick. But the profit center is what forces them to do that. Right?

Yeah. And working for these companies, you know, more than a decade ago, you know, more on the conservative side, we used to go and say any regulation against farmers and against, you know, pharmaceutical companies is nanny state and anti-free market. I used to make that argument and people still make that today. What I've learned now is that we don't have a free market. That's the key. I actually am not a fan of banning many drugs at all. I think people should be able to experiment with Ozempic, experiment with whatever. The problem is that in America, it costs 10 times more for Ozempic than in Germany, that the pharmaceutical industry has completely rigged Medicare and Medicaid. And let's take Medicaid, a program for lower income people that is not able to negotiate drug prices with the government. And the second a drug is approved for

Medicaid, it's free reign. Doctors can get reimbursements for it. So there's a bill right now with hundreds of co-sponsors for Ozempic to be approved for lower income people. I saw that, 4818. So think about that incentive. The doctor then has a incentive to get as many poor people as possible on Ozempic. They're getting an annuity from the government. That's $1,800 a month, right? $1,800 a month. That's insane. So Novo Nordics is the 10th most valuable company in the world. It recently passed LVMH, the fashion house, as the most valuable company in Europe. It's the most valuable company in Europe. And 85% of their profits are expected to come from the United States. It's not the standard of care in Europe, and it costs much less. It's all about the rigged US system. And actually, the US system is based on a co-opted Medicaid policy.

We're spending more on metabolic conditions just on Medicaid than the entire defense budget. Just on Medicaid. Just to handle the government metabolic conditions among poor people. It's bigger than our defense budget and growing much faster. So that's not a free market, right? Rigging the price so that we spend 10 times more than Germany and then incentivizing as many doctors to have a 15-minute appointment as possible with a lower-income person to prescribe them an injection instead of getting them on metabolically healthy habits. They get

this injection, don't change their actual habits, so they're inevitably going to cost us more and more and rack up other comorbidities. Does anyone think if you're eating 20% less poison that you're not going to cause more damage to yourself and have other health issues and live a thriving life? Of course not. All right. That's a lie. So you're getting people and incentivizing them on that terrain. My message top down, but I think this applies bottoms up too, is there's a lot of resources, your podcast, Casey and I try to talk about in the book, really where people are gravitating to, it's tips on metabolic health. I think there's a real awakening. At the top down level, I just ask for the incentives to be correct and for the science to be correct. It's just not scientifically

accurate to say obesity is an osemic deficiency generally. I totally agree with you. And then there's the whole shaming side of things that if you speak out against it, you're either a racist or you're a bigot or you're anti-low income, because why would you be against having ozempic as a covered drug for poor people? Well, I'm actually against it being a covered drug for anybody that hasn't, you know, at least tried to improve their metabolic health. And it's like, is the message that we can empower these people to take a little bit of responsibility and improve their metabolic health so maybe they don't get all of these chronic conditions, or do I love them more? And I'm not a racist because I just want to bring in a pharmaceutical solution. Let them

continue their toxic soup of what they're, they're destroying their cellular biology. But, you know, I'm not racist because I'm in support of having this drug be the solution. And you see that industrial complex shames you if you speak out against it. It's so interesting to compare how the medical system talks about food and childhood nutrition and how they talk about drugs, right? When it comes to children staying on a pharmaceutical program and staying to a schedule of pharmaceuticals in various sectors, there's no cost too high and there's no excuses. You are a bad parent if you do not administer pharmaceuticals to your kid. If your kid has a condition, a chronic condition later,

there's huge, huge, unrelenting clarity and guilt on those parents for that kid to take a SEM. So true. It is being, you know, think about how many, you know, your kid, they're struggling with their kid committing suicide if they don't do certain pharmaceutical procedures. It's, the medical system knows how to guilt and they know how to explain something in a really serious way. The medical system is so insistent about the importance of adhering to pharmaceuticals that they have their claws in tech companies and media companies, and it's considered the

highest level of dangerous disinformation to criticize a pharmaceutical product. But when it comes to not poisoning children at scale with ultra-processed food, oh, no, no, no, no. We can't possibly expect these dumb lower-income people to not poison their kids? How can we possibly expect them to do that? How can we possibly speak to them like adults? So there's a bottoms up message I have, and I think this can be a lot solved with the bottoms up. If doctors communicated to patients of all income levels with the same forcefulness and same clarity that they communicate with patients about taking pharmaceuticals, we'd be in a better place. The fact of the matter is it is really hard for lower income people and

single moms making it work, but we should communicate to them while the system's lighting it down. Somebody recently asked me, what would I say to a lower income mom who says she can only afford lunchables and processed food for her kids? I would say she's poisoning her shoulders. That's the first thing you have to say. That's a fact, right? And the system's letting her down, the system's lying to her, the incentives are totally stacked against her, but it is incumbent on every single parent to not poison their kids. And the first step, and again, I think this all just flows to medical guidelines. If I'm advising a leader about this, we don't need to get into bans. We don't need to get into taxes. We literally can spend a year just looking at the FDA, looking at the NIH, looking at

the USDA, getting corruption out of those systems and asking them for a report on glyphosate, for a report on food dyes in our kids' food, for reports on all of these thousands of ingredients that are in our food that aren't in other countries that are part of that science experiment to make the food more palatable, make the food addictive. Let's just get the truth. The policy falls where they may. If the USDA explains that glyphosate is a national security and public health emergency, I trust policymakers to do... Then it's there, but we need the science. That's what we need. And I think the problem is that parents and lawmakers... You mentioned senators and the congressmen not being bad people. I've met with 100 from both parties in the past year.

No, they're not. They just feel bashed over the head with all of these reports. They literally have lobbyists coming into their office with USDA reports saying glyphosate's fine and saying they're anti-science if they go against that. The NIH and Tufts Nutrition School, we all know about that study that said lucky charms are healthier than beef. Yeah, that was my favorite. It's funny. It's funny, but it's really not because that study, the top line, the reason for it, the cited reason from the NH was to influence childhood nutrition marketing guidelines. So the second you have these ridiculous studies saying Lucky Charms is healthier than beef and eggs, That thing goes to regulators and members of Congress.

And I hear this time and time again from senior members of Congress on relevant committees overseeing nutrition and health. They're like, I just don't have, like, I'm a military guy. This isn't my area of expertise. I can't fight the NIH and this unrelenting information and studies from top schools saying that I'm anti-science. How am I supposed to disagree with that? That's the point of all this corruption. So we just need to get to that and just tell people the truth. Yeah. You know, what was interesting, I heard you talk

on another podcast about, you know, because part of the people listening to this are like, oh, gosh, it's hopeless. And part of the people are empowered to say, I want to be a part of this change. And you laid out some really relatively simple things that, you know, an administration could do, you know, day one to really effectuate real change. Can you talk about some of those? Because I think it's important for the public to start to become aware that they actually do have a voice. I mean, elected officials are supposed to work for us. And if that voice, and I can't imagine that there would be much disagreement on either side of the aisle, you know, 98% of America's got to fall into that we don't want to see our kids sick. We don't want to see our moms and dads and ourselves and our families on the pharmaceutical treadmill. We've seen it in our families. We've seen the chronic disease.

We all have somebody who's suffering from cancer, who is pre-diabetic or who's obese or struggling with their weight or is on thyroid medication or antipsychotics or all of these things. I mean, so this, this message resonates, but I think people feel hopeless in what they can do. A hundred percent. And you laid out some, what I thought were very sensical things like, hey, day one, we could do this, this, this, and this. So in these many meetings with leaders, bipartisan, I actually have had members of Congress plead for the community to do one thing, which is make this a politically important issue. The politics drive

the policy. So before we get into policies, I just want to say everyone watching, I think in the American populace, this issue of the chronic disease crisis, I think is one of the most important kitchen table issues. The fact that we're getting sicker and more depressed than our kids are, I think that is clearly driving a lot of frustration. We need to channel that to the politicians and have them understand that that's a politically resonant issue. The problem is that when there's a pharma bill up, there's five lobbyists for every member of Congress really targeting that bill.

So what we're doing in chronicdisease.org, we're starting with a lot of other allies. You can go to that, sign up. Chronicdisease.org. In chronicdisease.org, you need to call your member. It matters. It actually matters. I hear time and time again, members are telling me the phone needs to be going off on this issue of ending chronic disease. And I think we've seen some dynamics in the political environment with the RFK endorsement on Trump. I know it's a very toxic political environment. I know people have strong opinions over those two people. But just as this is a bipartisan issue, we need to be really clear. We should be celebrating that President Trump is actually

speaking about regenerative farming now. He's actually speaking about taking corruption out of the FDA, the NIH, the USD. These are true bipartisan items. And there's frankly, Democrats speaking about it. This is not an issue of left versus right. It's us versus corruption. And I think there is a dynamic now where these issues are being talked about more. So my first thing in chronicdisease.org, just call your members, go to a town hall. We need to channel our voices to politics because there's an optimistic moment right now where I do believe we can make change. Okay, a president wants to sign stuff. What do we do?

We can turn this around so quickly. In one day, there can be an executive order saying that we are no longer the only country in the world, essentially, that allows direct-to-consumer pharma advertising on news. Why is that important? Because our information sources, their top contributor of money is an industry that, as a statement of economic fact, wants us sick. Why aren't there story after story on CNN and NBC and ABC News about the fact that 33% of young adults have prediabetes? Could there be a larger story? It's what you're talking about. It's what Joe Rogan's talking about. It's what the most popular books in the country are talking about. It's what everyone's thinking about. Not a single word about that on the

mainstream news. Not a single word about how COVID was essentially, I call it foodborne illness and a metabolic condition. It was nothing on that. So the fact that our information sources are totally co-opted, the fact that they're not going after anyone who's telling kids that ultra-processed food is okay, they're saying that's fine, but going after violently any parent who asks a question about a pharmaceutical product, that's a problem. So I actually think right there, in one day, you can cut 50% of revenue for the mainstream news, which I think would be a very positive thing for the country, and disentangle their incentive from being a referee for an industry that wants us sick. Number two, you can go to the USDA. You can immediately say tomorrow, the USDA nutrition

panel can no longer take money from the food industry. Right now, 95% of the people on the USDA nutrition advisory committee take money from food and pharma. That is insane. They take money from craft. Like any other industry, it would be criminal to have that kind of interest. 90% of people watching, 90% of Americans, if they were asked, is the guideline committee that makes recommendations for a two-year-old's nutrition, do you think that they are able to take millions and millions of dollars from the maker of Ozempic and Kraft? They'd say, of course not. People would just assume 95%.

Then you go to the NIH. The NIH just disclosed, and this was hidden, researchers, government employees made $700 million of unreported royalties during COVID from pharmaceutical makers. Made $700 million. $700 million. ProPublica, nonpartisan analysis, 80% of NIH grants go to a researcher with a direct conflict of interest on the item that they're studying. The NIH is an organization completely co-opted by pharma where literally employees are able to make royalties and money from pharma that is not researching why we're getting Alzheimer's. They're researching and all they're finding is going to completely preposterous marginal therapies, accepting that this explosion of dementia, which is essentially late stage diabetes by groundbreaking research, is a foregone conclusion of how do we profit from that.

The NIH incentives can be changed overnight. And then let's go to the FDA. First off, why is the same department regulating food, which is making us sick, and then drugs, which is profiting us? Why is the FDA department that approves drugs... Food and drug. Yeah, food and drug. It makes no sense.

Food leads to the drugs. That could be disentangled tomorrow with an executive order. And then... When you say disentangled, you'd separate food regulatory bodies from drug regulatory bodies. Right.

Exactly. Like we should have nutrition guidelines and standards and science from unbiased researchers, from people that aren't paid. When you have the Food and Drug Administration, okay, what's the funding of that? 50% of the funding comes from the pharmaceutical industry. So the pharmaceutical industry is paying the budget for the industry that oversees food guidelines. And the pharmaceutical industry, as a statement of economic fact, makes more money when we get sick from foodborne illnesses, essentially, for metabolic conditions. So I can tell you from being in DC that bureaucracies are built to grow. And when your funding source comes from the pharmaceutical industry and it's a revolving

door with all the leaders between the pharmaceutical industry and people even at the FDA are able to make consulting grants and get consulting grants and other royalties from the pharmaceutical industry, there's an incentive for the pharmaceutical industry to grow. That obviously shouldn't be the case. The industry that is supposed to be somewhat adversarial to the pharmaceutical industry should not be in bed with that industry. So overnight, you could take that incentive out and have that funded by third parties and have greater conflict of interest rules on there.

So literally, if you just start chipping away at the corruption, our information sources and our regulatory agencies, then the science comes out. Then I'll let the chips fall where they may, but I think we'll be learning a little bit more about glyphosate. I think we'll be learning a little bit more about ultra processed food and, you know, it gets to personnel. And I think, you know, we all have ideas on personnel, but unbiased researchers who I think I would argue just to drive more simplicity into nutrition guidelines. Working for the food companies, we spend 11 times more than the NIH on nutrition research. The nutrition research is PR for

processed food. There's not a broccoli lobby. There's not a big grass-fed meat lobby, right? We don't need studies on that. But there is a huge processed food lobby. Yeah. And that's the lifeblood of nutrition research. The entire point of nutrition research is to trick our just judgment. And literally, the defining report this year from the USDA says that a child's diet, 91% ultra processed food could be okay. It literally said that. Yeah. 91%. I saw that. One correction on the 50% of the FDA being funded by pharma, myself and Robert Kennedy used that statistic on some news programs. And the FDA released a official statement and they said, no, no, no, we have a correction. It's 47%. So my apologies to the FDA. It's 47% corruption, which is actually- We're going to get shadow banned for that 3% right now.

Which is actually misleading because 75% of the department that approves drugs is funded by pharma. Wow. So it was misleading. 75% of the department that approves drugs is funded by pharma. And 47%, it's actually 48% if you really want to be precise, is of the entire department, which includes all food regulation, is funded byGo Plus. This portable hydrogen generator is a game changer. Simply take the top off, pour your bottled water in, and with the push of a button,

it transforms into high-concentration hydrogen water. You'll see the bubbles rising. That's the hydrogen being generated right before your eyes. Hydrogen water offers numerous benefits, and these are backed by peer-reviewed clinical studies. These include reduced inflammation, enhanced absorption of our supplements and our nutrients, balanced stomach acid levels, and support for your gut health by feeding beneficial bacteria. In my opinion, hydrogen

water is by far the best water you can drink, and with the Echo Go Plus, you can take it anywhere. Visit echowater.com, that's echowater.com and enter the code ultimate 10 for a special discount and elevate your hydration game. Now let's get back to the ultimate human podcast. That is absolutely mind numbing because it disincentivizes the nutritional value of, of food. Um, because the higher the nutritional value of food, I mean, one of, one of my major arguments that I talked about it, you know, at the beginning of the podcast is that we were nutrient deficient right and when you start pulling nutrients out of the cells you know i was actually reviewing a research article that's that's going to go into my book um uh that that's coming out

next month and what what they did was they actually looked at the folic acid supplementation in our food supply. And folate is a natural form of folic acid, is a synthetic form. And you get it in green leafy vegetables and everything else, and from eggs and lots of whole food sources. So if you're eating a diet rich in whole foods, you foods getting plenty of folate um but the majority of americans are deficient in that so we we came up with a synthetic form called folic acid we started spraying our whole grain supply and uh you know we spray all our pastas you know cereals breads and there was a slight decline in in neural tube defects and so they said see um we added folic acid supplementation and neural tube defects went down. But if you had

actually done a side-by-side study and added more natural folate to the diet, meaning if their nutrition was right, you would also see the rates of neural tube defects go down. So are neural tube defects going down because people are missing this synthetic nutrient, which we make in a laboratory, or are neural tube defects, you know uh on the rise because they're not eating healthy diet and i and you can see from this study i'll actually put it in these show notes um that it was just because they're not eating a healthy diet and i think a lot of our pharmaceuticals are there to substitute the lack of nutrients coming from a whole food diet you know people ask me all the time you know I be keto, carnivoric, paleo, vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian?

No, you should eat whole foods. Just start there. Just eat whole foods. That alone would make a material change in your life. And then sleep and then move. I used to think 10 years ago, I'd say all these concepts around supplementation, food as medicine, soil health as kind of French topics. I used to think the same. And that's what the medical system really

trains us. It's just scientifically obvious to anyone looking, these need to be the baseline of medicine. I mean, looking at the food in your kitchen, just beautiful grass-fed steak and beautiful produce, that is feeding ourselves. It's these tons, tons of food that is 3D printing our bodies. And the fact that we have this blind spot where that's not seen as serious medicine is nothing short of a scandal. I mean, you get down to what our standard of care should be, what primary care should be. I think primary care should be free, functional

medicine, in-depth blood tests for every single American to have a detailed understanding of what's going in, of what their nutrient levels are. We are flying completely blind. And even with the current blood tests we get, it's like, you know, I had relatively high cholesterol levels a couple of years ago. The doctor said, oh, it's fine. Totally fine. Show my sister. She's like, no, that's really serious metabolic dysfunction. Went back to the doctor. Oh yeah, it's really bad, but you're not treatable yet. So we just wait. We just wait for you to be at a level. It's like the pre-diabetic wait till you go off the cliff and we'll get you insulin.

Right, right. But we're all brewing this and it's not the statin or metformin deficiencies. It's often nutrient. We can match nutrient needs. I think biohacking is such a noble calling because nobody really wants to do this, but I think our modern society has just robbed us of a lot of our needs that our cells and our bodies are used to over. So to me, a lot of biohacking is actually, they're taxes that we need to be aware of for modern society. You know, we used to have a very ingrained circadian rhythm. There wasn't artificial light. You know, that's

what our biological makeup expects. So I'm glad we have light, but we need to be aware of that. We're not in the sun as much anymore. Right. Um, we didn't used to have gyms. We used to just move a lot. We used to do the rocking type things all the time. Right. Just naturally. But, but, but, but just, just bringing these things back and just, just be having an honest conversation about what our cells and, and, and metabolic health require and require and making that part of medicine to supplement those items in as we lose them from very positive parts of modern society. I just think we're not having the right conversation.

So we need a much more personalized approach. I encourage everyone to get a more precision, more deeper understanding of their nutrient deficiencies and their biomarkers, which I know you preach. And I think that's a huge part. And that just gives you knowledge. We hear a lot from doctors that it's actually dangerous for patients to know the truth. The FDA actually until this year said, CGMs, no, no, no, you shouldn't have those. The body scans, they are still against. They're even against in-depth blood testing anyways. Early detection.

Yeah. Just understanding and actually understanding that we're really at... Understanding for my sister that I was really at risk of metabolic dysfunction, that's very motivating. Yeah. No, it is very motivating. To know the truth. And it's motivating for you to actually make you know some lifestyle choices and and what's interesting is if you make the lifestyle choice your your kids make the the like the lifestyle choices um you know we you ever look at um videos of of um the the 1960s like pe classes in the 60s it was like holy cow like these guys are going hand over hand on the uh you know on

the on the rungs they had these dead hang tests. They were doing pushups. They were doing sit-ups. They had times for 400 meter runs, times for one mile runs. And 95% of the kids qualified for these, you know, basic physical assessments. You know, I've told this story before, but years ago I owned a CrossFit gym when it was just starting to take off. I invested in a CrossFit gym when it was just starting to take off. I invested in a CrossFit gym. One of the things we did for community outreach was we allowed kids after school to have this program where it was free. And they would come and we would do basic exercises in the gym.

And to sort of put the kids into basic, intermediate, and advanced because we wanted it to be challenging for them. We did some ultra simple tests. Two of the tests were dead hang. We wanted them to be able to just hang there for two minutes. The majority of the sixth graders couldn't hang for more than 10 or 15 seconds. And we would lift them back up there and say, no, no, no, hold on as long as you can. They're like, no, I can't. I am. And I'm like, you can't be holding on because you're only hanging there for 10 seconds. And they would drop and they would drop. And then one of them was to sit down on a, we had a one foot high box jump. It was a foot off the ground. And we just told them to sit down on the box jump. And then without their hands, lean forward and stand up. Like 45% of the kids couldn't stand up from a one foot box jump. I'm talking about sixth graders, like kids that should be sprinting around the playground, like, like they're out of their minds and they

would fall over and they would roll and they were falling backwards. And I'm like, what are you guys doing? Look, I would stand in front of them and go, okay, stand up. They couldn't stand up from a box jump. And I, and it really hit my partner, uh, TJ and I, like, it really just hit us like, this is crazy. Like these sixth graders can't get up. Like, what are they doing? And then you realize, man, they took physical education out of the, out of the system. Um, you know, they're being parented by an iPad. Um, you know, all of their, um, attention is in this really, really, really tiny, tiny focal area. And when you really start thinking about the fine motor skills it takes to to keep your concentration inside of a three inch by four inch screen your brain's just not meant meant for that and i i just personally

remember how astounded i was at the lack of just basic physical i mean i don't even call it physical fitness just basic physicality this these you know the kids kids couldn't get up off a one-foot box jump so do you think that there's in addition to affecting public policy um in in in public schools i read an article i don't know how true this is what that that you know uh some of the public school systems are just going to go to lunchables um as to make it easy which is basically processed flour um high fructose corn syrup um highly highly processed foods in plastic containers um you just tear the top of it and there's your you know peanut butter and jelly sandwich on white bread and there's a couple of ritz crackers and

there's some fruit that really isn't even fruit anymore it's swimming in and and um high fructose corn syrup um and i was just astounded by that, right? So you strip PE out of the schools, you feed these kids, you know, lunchables. I feel like if we could get ahold of the public school food programs, I mean, especially in underprivileged communities, you know, that alone would make a demonstrative difference.

And you know, what's amazing is like, you know, you would make a demonstrative difference and you know what's what's amazing is like you know you look at rates of of violence and depression and um alcoholism and drug use and especially in in underprivileged communities and you gotta ask yourself could a lot of this be fueled by the by the immense lack of nutrition in their bodies, by the deficiencies in dopamine and serotonin that come from eating these ultra-processed foods. I mean, the amount of impact we could have on society by changing these things.

A lower-income woman in the United States dies 15 years younger than an upper-income woman. Wow. There's obviously many variables here, but the top variable there is nutrition and is our ultra processed food environment. What we are doing to lower income people in this country is criminal. And it's not only criminal to those citizens where we're, I think, destroying their metabolic health, destroying their hormones, destroying their serotonin levels. You know, if you're diabetic by the time you're 30, you die 15 years younger

than an average American. I think that's highly related here. And, you know, you're three or four times more likely to be depressed. This is what we go into in case he speaks about so eloquently in the book is our body is connected. And if our body, you know, isn't able, if our cells aren't able to process and make energy correctly, that shows up in a many different ways. You know, it shows up ourselves in our liver, it shows up in fatty liver disease, which is now 20% of, of young adults, you know, and used to be a chronic alcoholic. Yeah, exactly. For older people. Yeah. And, you know, and 20% of our energy is producing our brain and 3% of body weight. It's our, and if we're metabolic, it's functional,

it shows up, it shows up everywhere. So, so yeah, I think the fact that we're essentially incentivizing poison for our kids, you know, Michelle Obama was right. I think the first year when she said that our school lunches are a big issue. Actually, John Kerry's family actually talked to her. Teresa Hines, Kerry was his wife, Kraft Hines, had a big ownership stake. And they actually met with her and other food makers. And she actually got off of talking about food and shifted to exercise, which is very important, but what the food industry, actually the food industry is the largest funder of many exercise advocacy groups, because it's a little bit of a distraction. So she moved to exercise. She was actually right. I mean, one of the biggest sources of American children's calories is federally funded school lunches. There is zero nutrition guidelines,

zero requirements. So whatever side of the aisle you're on, if we're going to be funding billions of dollars for lower income populations, we should not be giving them addicting crap that is destroying their metabolic health. And yeah, so I think we're absolutely really committing almost suicide against our population by incentivizing addictive crap, which then leads to suboptimal lives demonstrably for low-income people and trillions of dollars on Medicaid, as I mentioned, of downstream health impacts. It's a suicidal policy. And it's not only suicidal policy, it's just not even good fiscal policy. It's like, we were talking about this in the kitchen before

the podcast. We don't think that we have a socialized healthcare system, but we have a worse than socialized healthcare system because the healthcare system is directly funded by the taxpayer. And so as healthcare costs increase, the burden on the taxpayer is going to increase because Medicaid, Medicare are not free. You might think they're free because you get the service without paying out of your pocket, but it's funded by taxpayer dollars. And before we send $3 trillion in, you know, through this obesity bill, um, to Europe, um, to fund a pharmaceutical company to come back in and, um, you know, treat our, um, obesity pandemic with top-down drugs, we ought to think about what, what could $3 trillion do, you know, in a bottom-up approach by improving the nutritional content of our food. Right.

This isn't partisan. So you have the policy framework, get corruption out of the medical guidelines, fix the incentives. This isn't partisan in any way. It's not even anti-big pharma. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Like absolutely drugs could be part of the equation, but it's just not medically accurate that when nine of the top 10 killers of Americans are tied to preventable metabolic conditions

that we're lunging for the prescription pad at a moment's notice. It's just not medically accurate. So there's just no ideology here. The medical system with the $4.5 trillion we're spending should be asking, how do we keep people healthy? How do we reverse and prevent conditions? They're not asking that. Everyone American would expect that they're asking that. They're asking fundamentally the incentives of the system are how do we profit from growing chronic disease? The fundamental rallying that a presidential administration

and a regulatory administration needs a reset on is the question of health authorities is how do we prevent and reverse chronic conditions and promote thriving for Americans? Love it. And if you just have that, the science will flow from that. And the third area that's tied to all this is a concept I call benefit flexibility. So Justin and I were actually asked to contribute some language for,

you know, we'll talk to anyone who wants to talk. Yeah. The Republican- Yeah, he sent me some of the policy that you guys have- Yeah, yeah. We worked on some policy, and we were actually able to contribute, we were asked to contribute some ideas to the Republican platform. And the key line in the Republican platform that was ratified is we support chronic disease prevention, which is a profound point because 95% of spending is on management, not prevention, and benefit flexibility. So what does benefit flexibility mean? I think this is – and this gets into TRUMA, but I think this is a key concept that we need to move healthcare policy to. Right now, we have a one-size-fits-all system and a top-down system. As I said, if your kid is distracted, they're getting Adderall. You're not hearing about sunlight for them. You're not hearing about movement for them. You're getting

no incentives for movement. In Europe, they do incentivize exercise. They do incentivize a keto diet in many cases or various other dietary protocols for various evidence-backed nutrition interventions. If you're pre-diabetic in Norway, you're getting government-funded food as medicine before all the pills. So what my big thing is, and I think there's a real movement to this, is flexible accounts where a single mom, instead of having her kid who has high cholesterol just immediately getting on the pharmaceutical treadmill, can choose potentially to steer some of that money to help with exercise, to help with red light, to help with potential supplementation or food. There's a big movement to this. You know, there's $150 billion in HSA, FSA accounts right now. But to your point on young people, you know, Justin and I talk, and we're in this space, we talk to a lot of young people,

you know, in their 20s, 30s, 40s. They say, I'm healthy. And then we're like, well, okay, didn't you get into it? Anxiety, depression, fatigue, chronic pain, infertility. We've normalized the suffering to such a degree that people who are suffering and clearly brewing metabolic dysfunction almost always say that they're healthy. And my message to everybody is max out your flexible benefit accounts. If your doctor before taking out the statin prescription or another drug prescription in many cases for chronic conditions isn't writing a letter of medical necessity outlining dietary or exercise interventions for you, get a new doctor.

We can actually, with our flexible accounts, use that for root cause interventions, the type of things you're talking about. Our talk about these products and things that aren't pharmaceuticals often marginalized. It's not. It's the scientific just reality that in many cases, refraining from the chronic disease medications and actually going on a path of curiosity about your metabolic health and how to supplement what our cells are not getting is very important and can be a clear medical intervention if you work with a medical provider, either through telehealth or in person, to get that plan. And one big thing I'm preaching, and both sides of the aisle are looking at, is just expanding more programs into flexible accounts. Letting patients work with their doctors, you know, search out, you know, potentially a more functional root cause

interventions if they choose to. And if we can just open up flexibility, if we can just give patients, I believe that they're gonna make the right decision. If they don't, it's a free country, but they're reading books, they're on this path. We just need to unlock that within the system. It's the fastest growing area of interest. I mean, how many people, first of all,

I'm a huge fan of your company, TrueMed, and what you and Justin are doing there, and Chad, and I think the world of it. But how much money is available there? I mean, how many people have these HSAs or FSAs that are unaware that they could be using these for preventive type care? Justin and I call TrueMed an issue advocacy organization agnostic with TrueMed. I want every American to know this. 80% of people watching have access to an HSA or an FSA. 80% of the people watching have access to a flexible spending account. We're coming up on quarter four where all of us are going to just click through our insurance real quick and just like, okay,

accept, accept, accept. There's a box for most people where you can contribute automatically tax-free money to a flexible account. And most people don't because it's like, oh, I'm not sick yet. I don't know it's use it or lose it. It's kind of confusing, right? Or I don't want to contribute thousands of dollars. They're pre-tax dollars.

So if you're in New York making a good salary, it could be up to 50%. It's whatever your tax rate is, but it's generally around 30, 40%, right? That money just with one click of a button and it could be about $8,000 for a family, 80% of people watching, you can contribute that into a tax-free account. So there's this concern, okay, what am I going to use that money for? I'm not taking a bunch of drugs. Am I going to lose it? This is my point to everyone watching. TrueMed or work with a doctor if you have a forward-thinking doctor, but TrueMed makes it very easy. You can qualify if exercise,

if supplementation, if food in some cases, if red light therapy, if sauna, if cold plunges. We're working closely with Ryan Dewey at Plunge. If these items are evidence-backed and clinically backed by our third-party providers who make these determinations to prevent or reverse a condition that is unique to you, you can receive, based on the provider's discretion that we seamlessly connect you with, a letter of medical necessity. So we're working with Eight Sleep. We're working with Plunge. We're working with Momentous. We're working with CrossFit. I'm going to DC in a week with Don Fowle to talk about

how CrossFit is one of the most clinically proven ways to reverse and prevent disease. Just looking at the science, we can prescribe CrossFit, our third-party providers. And that then unlocks the ability to drive medical tax advantage dollars to these items. So I want everyone to understand if you or your family is working to prevent or reverse a chronic condition, look into maximizing your tax-free accounts. And what's been amazing with TrueMed, quite frankly, and we've been driving the conversation on this, we've helped hundreds of thousands of patients this year.

We have shifted hundreds of millions of dollars of tax advantage money that was going to wait for people to get sick and go to ineffective, often pharmaceutical interventions. We've helped hundreds of millions of Americans shift that money to root cause interventions. And the stories we get are just astounding. The act of people, this isn't just tax savings. It's really, I think, one of the only ways in the medical system right now to vote with your dollars and shift your dollars to thriving. And a key point is prevention counts as well. I mean, the top drugs that HSA, FSA dollars go to right now are statins, which is

pre-heart disease, preventative, and metformin, which is prescribed for pre-diabetes. So we've been engaging with a lot of the healthcare community. They're like, oh, you know, people need to be like on their deathbed basically before. No, no, no, no, no, no. The most popular drugs in America are preventative. They're not working. Right.

But they're preventative. And the definition of medicine absolutely counts for preventative. Oh, okay, okay. Too many people are getting CrossFit prescriptions. 94% of the country is metabolically dysfunctional. You know, the medical provider, oh, it needs to be an urgent necessity. It is an urgent necessity.

It is an urgent necessity that the vast majority of American people get a CrossFit prescription, get a omega-3 prescription, get a vitamin D. It's all dependent on the patient. And we have an independent third-party determination, but we are unapologetic and very clear. We are able and happy to debate any medical expert on whether it's scientifically appropriate for the vast majority of the American people to be on urgent medical intervention.

That includes exercise, targeted supplementation, sodas, nutrition. Yeah. Love it. supplementation, saunas, nutrition. That's why we're in existence. And we hope, and we're using it, frankly, with Don Fallacy of CrossFit and Ryan Dewey from Plunge. We're going to DC. We're not arguing for anything. We're evangelizing what we're doing to make the case that more... What if everyone, lower income folks that were spending over a trillion dollars for Medicaid on, they're able to work with their kids and get them on exercise, potentially sauna in some cases, right? I use it in my parents.

I mean, I'm telling you, I'm very open about what happened to my mother. And she was in such a state of cognitive decline from immobility. And because she was deconditioned, you know, I looked at Dr. Otto Warburg's research and multi-step oxygen therapy. And so I got him a sauna and ran a little nasal cannulas in there with some, some O2. She does some very light exercise in there. They turn around in, in her and my father, both was mind numbing, just getting their heart rate up, getting a little light sweat, getting some oxygen into their bodies. Cause it's hard for them to get their, their, their heart rates up. And so the fact that you have this true bed, I mean, I'm putting all of this into the show notes. You know, I like Tucker

Carlson. I saw him doing this on his podcast. I don't often do this either, but I believe so much in your message. And you and I are working on some things behind the scenes too, to even further affect public policy. And I really pray that those come to fruition and I'm honored to be working with you and Justin and your sister and a bunch of other folks, RFK, on really changing public policy. I think that's the greatest gift that we could give humanity

is the ability to really effectuate change. But I think so many people are going to be so enthralled by this message. I mean, first of all, I'm going to give the book a shout out, you know, good energy. It's already a bestseller. I hope it becomes a world-dominating bestseller, and I'll do my best to help grow the readership of this book. Where can people find out more about you? Where can they get information on TruMed,

on how they can contact their congressman in fact, public policy? Great. Where do they go? TruMed.com. We help you whether you use TruMed or not to figure out how to maximize your flexible account dollars. I'm on the socials, at Cali Means, talking a lot about this, a lot about the advocacy. And our associated nonprofit, we're working with warriors across the

spectrum to get this message out and to prepare ground politically for policy changes and chronicdisease.org. And I would just give the ask, and I haven't done this yet, but I just really want to say, if we can get hundreds of thousands of people to fill out that form, send an email to your member, create, channel the frustration you might be feeling into five minutes of action. It matters. So follow me. I'll be talking a lot about this. We have an opportunity. I think we can feel it. This is being talked about more and we can translate that political frustration into action if we take these micro actions. So yeah, we'll be talking about that on endchronicdisease.org.

And it's so proud to be in this mission with you, Gary. Yeah, I'm proud to be in this mission with you too. And I end all my podcasts the same way by asking all my guests the same question. There's no right or wrong answer to the question, but what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human? It's a path of curiosity. I don't think we're ever going to get to the perfect answer, but I think we're, you know, if I could hope for one thing for my two-year-old, it's just having awe and appreciation for their metabolic health, which I think is the key to everything. Understanding the

link between the sun and the soil and the movement. And I think actually understanding and thinking about the interconnectedness of our body and our environment is a real key to happiness yeah so i i think just being on a continually path of curiosity that i do think is being robbed from us by many of these dark forces and incentives or a system yeah i agree with that kelly thank you so much for your time today i'm a huge fan of your mission and I know that my audience is going to get a lot out of this podcast. I mean, there's thousands of great tidbits in this podcast. And I hope you'll come back again.

I'm excited to have your sister on as well. And until next time, guys, that's just science.