Metabolic Dysfunction: The Silent Epidemic | Casey Means DSH #1126

There's been a lot of fires in Cali.

Tons.

It's just super weird to me.

When I think about the chronic disease epidemic that's going on in human bodies right now, like a lot of what's causing us to be sick right now with metabolic dysfunction is chronic inflammation.

And it's just so interesting to see like what's happening in the body reflected on planet Earth in a sense.

Viewpoints right now, the algorithm is fueling, there's inflammation in the body, and then it's almost like there's inflammation in our environment.

All right, guys, Casey Means here today coming off of Joe Rogan.

Congrats.

Thank you.

Hey, you guys have been blowing up.

It's been quite a month.

Tucker, Joe Rogan, you can't get much, much bigger than that.

So congrats.

Thank you.

It's so wonderful to see this conversation about foundational health becoming mainstream.

And I do feel like there's kind of a spark being lit in America right now, which is very exciting.

No, there absolutely is.

What you guys are doing is groundbreaking because I was talking about this stuff like a year or two ago, and it would get either banned or I'd get a strike.

But now it's so big that everyone's talking about it.

Yeah.

I think the cat's out of the bag.

Like, I don't, I don't know if the genie can go back in the bottle now because there's awareness starting.

People are, people, people knew something wasn't quite right with like the health of our children and what's going on in America and the health trends that are going on.

But no one, I think, really.

could exactly put their finger on why.

And then I think post-COVID, as people started feeling more comfortable sort of questioning the status quo in healthcare, and then some of these powerful figures like Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson, Bobby Kennedy, et cetera, starting to talk about it, it's like putting voice to power.

And now I think so many more people feel comfortable sharing these things themselves and their communities and their families because it's in the zeitgeist.

And that is powerful.

So once the cat's out of the bag, it's like, it's like a fire that goes.

And I think we're past the point of return.

Like I think we're past the point of no return now where I think people can't put this back in a box.

Yeah, I feel like we're at the point now where some type of action has to be taken, right?

Right.

I mean, the trends that we're dealing with right now with health are completely unsustainable.

And if they keep going the way they're going, we're going to face, you know, an existential problem with,

I think, our population and the future of humanity.

That's just the reality.

Like, if the graphs that we have today of every chronic illness, things like cancer and Alzheimer's dementia and type 2 diabetes and obesity and infertility, keep going the way the graphs are going.

And there's no reason they would stop if we don't change anything about the environment, we'll be facing an existential health collapse in the near future.

And so I think people, people know that on sub-subconscious level, and now the pieces are being put together.

And that's

pretty cool.

It's scary times.

I have have friends of mine scared to have kids.

For sure.

I know a lot of people who are scared to have kids.

Yeah, the autism rates and the health concerns, it's really concerning, right?

And many of the threats that I think are impacting our cellular biology and that are making the modern world we're living in quite literally hostile to foundational cellular function, they're invisible.

You don't actually, you can't actually see them.

You can't see the microplastics.

You can't see the pesticides.

You can't see the heavy metals.

You can't see the EMFs.

You can't see a lot of these things.

And so it becomes scary because everyone has a story of their perfectly healthy aunt who got lung cancer at age 50, who'd never smoked.

Everyone has a story of their friend's child who was totally healthy and they do everything right.

And then the kid got autism.

So things are happening now that it's almost like, wait, I could do everything quote unquote right.

And these really strange things are still happening to people around us because our environment, again, it's this cumulative exposure to so many different things that are fundamentally disastrous to our cellular biology

that we need to start chipping away at and moving back towards, you know, towards

detoxifying all of it.

And so, you know, and then you've got the scientific community that studies things.

Everything in science is studied in isolation.

You study one variable at a time.

And so it looks like, oh, yeah, it's not, it's not the fluoride that's the problem.

It's not the heavy metals and the vaccines that are a problem.

Oh, it's not the pesticide, this one pesticide that's a problem.

Oh, it's not the forever chemicals.

There's no studies to show that that's the the thing that's causing cancer.

Yeah, no shit.

It's everything together all at once that's changed in the last 50 years that's causing the problem.

But that's not really the way that science is operationalized to be done.

And so there's plausible deniability for everyone.

Like, oh yeah, we don't actually know what the cause is.

But that's why I think, again, Before it was like, you were a conspiracy theorist if you said it was the microplastics or the fluoride or whatever it is.

But now we're starting to put, again, put voice to people.

this, it's this toxic matrix that we're living in around us that we need to be aware of and maybe do science a little bit differently to start to understand like what's actually happening to human bodies right now in the modern world.

Yeah.

And I also think science has been part of science has been compromised.

You look at who's funding the studies and it's like the big food companies.

It's like, how can I trust this information?

Yeah, it's unbelievable.

Like

in some like private research studies, you'd be like, okay, I can expect that the food industry or the pharmaceutical industry or the chemical industry is funding this paper.

Like it's private.

But in our public.

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Uh industries that, you know, of course, I'm not going to say that these are like direct bribes or that they absolutely lead to a specific outcome in the science, but what do they do?

They compromise our judgment and even how we think about the problematic nature or toxicity of the products that we're studying and the things that we're studying.

And

I think it's just really important that for a federally funded agency that's taxpayer funded, like the NIH, that purportedly is to help with American health, that we would keep it clean from industry influence.

Because right now, you know, as you know, there's this incredible devil's bargain that's happening in America right now, where the largest and fastest growing industry in the country, which is the healthcare industry, $4.5 trillion a year, it's almost 20% of the largest GDP in the country.

That industry, which is designed to grow as an unemotional statement of fact, makes more money when patients are sick and utilizing healthcare services over longer periods of time and dependent on those services.

And so they do not actually have the healthcare system from an economic perspective does not have an incentive to keep people healthy.

And then you've got a food system, an ultra-processed food system, which is around a $2 trillion industry.

So now we're at like $6.5 trillion.

And that ultra-processed food industry, again, designed to grow.

And how do they grow?

They get more people addicted to the cheapest food possible for as long a period of time as possible.

So you make the food hyper-patable and addictive, and then that creates incredible illness.

We're eating ourselves to death in this country.

And then you've got a healthcare system that profits off managing those conditions for decades and decades.

And that's when you have those incentives in place.

we are dealing with the predictable outcome that would happen from those types of business incentives, which we have a massively chronically ill population due to our toxic food system.

And we're not truly being healed by the healthcare system because there is really not any profit in healing.

So, this is all very predictable.

Like, it's, it's very clear.

If you just said to an alien that came from out of space, these are the incentives of our system.

What do you think is going to happen?

You'd have a massively chronically ill population.

That's what we're seeing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This hits deep for me.

I lost my father to the healthcare system.

I almost lost my own life.

They put me on Xanax and I ended up having a seizure from withdrawal.

Whoa.

But yeah, with my father, he ended up in a psych ward.

He came out even worse.

And when he entered, they put him on all sorts of medication.

He was shaking and he just couldn't handle it.

Wow.

You know, and you see that with a lot of people in psych wards.

They come out like even worse than before.

Yeah.

And I lost my mom, you know, really to the broken healthcare system three years ago.

She ultimately died of stage four pancreatic cancer.

She had only 13 days between her diagnosis and her death.

But what was so interesting is like she had access to the best doctors in America.

She was being at Stanford, being seen at Stanford and the Mayo Clinic.

And it just was so interesting how the way they approached us at the time of her cancer diagnosis, it was like,

they were like, oh my God, we're so sorry.

This is so unlucky.

It's so unlucky.

And if you really look at it, it's like, was it unlucky?

She had six or seven diagnoses at the time.

She had high blood pressure, high cholesterol.

She was overweight.

She had high blood sugar.

She had had 12 pound babies, which is actually like a sign of also metabolic issues.

So she'd had 40 years of these like red flags for an underlying problem in her body.

But of course, in our American healthcare system, what do we do with patients like that?

Which is basically everyone, right?

That's like most of our country now.

You send them to the cardiologist for the heart stuff.

You send them to the endocrinologist for the blood sugar stuff.

You send them to the obesity medicine doctor for the weight stuff.

You send them to the internal medicine doctor for the high blood pressure.

You send them to OGYN for the, you know, bad menopausal symptoms and the big babies.

It's like no one's talking.

It's, it's absolutely profitable to be siloed.

So we have a system that puts people in silos and specialists' office.

We have over 100 medical and surgical subspecialties right now.

And the more specialties we invent out of thin air, the sicker Americans are getting.

Because what it does is it basically

makes both doctors and patients think that the body is a bunch of all these different separate parts, which is not true.

We're one unified system.

We're a very dynamic system.

And so you get doctors being incentivized to not see the forest for the trees, to not see the root causes and the connecting points between all these diseases.

And what the science is clearly showing us is that almost every chronic disease that's torturing American lives across a lifespan from infancy to older age.

So from starting from ADHD and autism and behavioral issues in children and asthma and allergies, all the way to Alzheimer's dementia and cancer and stroke and heart disease and the things that are killing us in our old age, they're all along the exact same physiologic spectrum, which is called metabolic dysfunction.

And that metabolic dysfunction is, by and large, not caused by our genetics because it's skyrocketing over the past 50 years.

Our genetics haven't changed in 50 years.

It's because of the way that the environment, on every single level, our custom, our culture in the Western world that has become so, so

toxic,

it is synergistically destroying our foundational cellular health and our cells become metabolically dysfunctional.

And then that really is the trunk of the tree of every chronic disease that we're seeing today on the intracellular, that invisible physiologic layer.

because seeing connecting points and root cause physiology and the environmental factors that impact disease if we actually focused all our attention on that what would it do well we'd help we'd empower patients to clean up the environment around their bodies and what's going in and around their bodies and their metabolic function improve and a lot of the diseases would go away.

Very unprofitable, very unprofitable.

So no one's talking about it.

I didn't even learn about this in medical school, at Stanford medical school.

And yet the science is overtly clear.

That's, of course, why we wrote a book about it.

But it's just astonishing to me that there's answers hidden in plain sight that are life-saving for people.

And because there's not a financial incentive to focus on it,

it's not only not a part of the dominant conversation, but it is mocked by legacy media who literally put, have, as of this past month, have put the words the chronic disease epidemic in quotes.

It was either in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal when they were writing about the Senate hearing that I just was a part of, you know, basically saying that it's totally overblown and it's sort of like a theory.

It's not a theory.

Just look at the graphs.

But so not only do we ignore it, we are actually incentivized to demonize it.

Yeah.

Well, they fund their advertising spend.

Right.

60% of legacy media's advertising budget is paid for by pharmaceutical companies.

And a large percent on social media too.

It's astonishing.

Yes.

You too.

Yeah.

And big food.

Yeah.

So it all makes sense.

It's all very clear.

But like at some point as individuals and communities, like we have to, we have to like rip the cord and like say we understand what's going on.

We have to make different choices because the current choices we're making right now, they're not working for human health.

Yeah.

And those choices, it's crazy because I got a pernuvo scan this morning.

Whoa.

Yeah.

Cool.

So if you want to, the thing is, if you want to be preventable, insurance won't cover it.

Yeah.

So you got to make these choices out of your own pocket.

Most people can't afford it.

that's where the catch-22 is.

Yeah.

And it's all by design.

You know, the number one cause of bankruptcy in the United States is healthcare costs.

Isn't that amazing?

And you get people in such a trap because it's actually not that expensive to be healthy.

Like you buy real food, you go outside, you get good sleep, you manage your stress, you exercise.

It's not that expensive.

But for that individual who is just trying to make ends meet, maybe actually spending that extra $50 a week on organic food or real food, maybe that is too much.

And yet just that small investment in the right time early might save like bankruptcy down the road.

But like, we put people in such a rigged system right now where we actually federally incentivize unhealthy food to be cheaper for people.

Like, our farm bill literally pays for commodity crops that are turned into ultra-processed foods.

We are taxpayer-subsidizing processed food in this country.

And so, we put people in this incredible trap.

But I think what's so interesting right now is that there's actually some meaningful movement on

making making preventative care more affordable by actually just using our existing like tax system.

My brother started a company called TrueMed, which I think is absolutely brilliant,

which

really understood that in our tax system right now with no changes to it, there is actually an amazing carve-out that says that you can use pre-tax dollars through HSA and FSA to buy products that

are known to prevent, manage, or reverse any disease if your doctor deems it necessary.

So you actually do need a letter of medical necessity from a doctor, but if you have that, you can

use tax advantage dollars to buy products.

So we know that real food prevents obesity and diabetes and it can also cure these things.

What's so interesting is that you have all these doctors who go through medical school, which is underrated by pharma, who don't even understand the concept of food as medicine and never learned to write a letter of medical necessity.

In my nine years of Stanford medical school and then head and neck surgery training,

I never heard the word letter of medical necessity.

I did not know I could write a letter for a patient to basically prescribe healthy food, vegetables,

a CrossFit membership, but it's completely allowed.

And so there's this movement happening where I think people are using the levers at our disposal, like our tax system, to actually help people get products that are preventative a lot cheaper, which is good.

And you're starting to see a big movement outside of the the traditional healthcare system.

So many startups and venture capital going towards things like function health and, you know, my company levels, TrueMed,

services that allow people to be empowered in their health outside the healthcare system.

So we're in a really interesting time right now.

And I kind of wonder if there's going to be a tipping point where like so many people are seeking, you know, seeking care outside the system that in a sense, it becomes big enough that the system has to adjust in order to stay.

I think it will.

I mean, I'm paying $700 a month for insurance right now.

Nothing is preventative.

Nothing.

Like I'm only paying for like if something happens to me, basically.

Right.

Right.

And I think a lot of people, what they're going to end up doing is moving to the highest deductible plans that are the cheapest.

So the cheapest possible plan with a high deductible, then put as much money as possible into HSA FSA, try and buy most of their preventative care through the HSA FSA with low monthly premiums because you have a high deductible plan.

And then not utilize as basically use your insurance for catastrophic care.

Like if you have a big accident, but primarily use your tax advantage dollars outside the system through hsa fsa to like pay for your pernuvo scan or pay for your organic food from the farmer's market or pay for your crossfit membership pay for your function health pay for your continuous glucose monitors whatever it is so we'll we're we're living through a fascinating time right now where things are going to change because the current like at every level of society people are realizing the current system's not working.

Absolutely.

When you were in med school, the curriculum, who exactly creates that?

Is that big pharma?

Well,

it would be hard to like prove that, right?

But if you look at, so I mean, there's a couple interesting things.

One is that the accreditation like group that basically accredits medical schools,

the criteria they use to evaluate medical schools has basically not been modernized since 1910 when the Flexner Report came out.

The Flexner Report was this

report that was approved by Congress that was essentially Rockefeller's private lawyer went out.

And because Rockefeller realized that he could use byproducts of his oil refining to make pharmaceuticals, he decided he wanted the entire medical system to really move towards a reactive, pill-based, intervention-based, away from natural medicine and holistic medicine that, you know, had been the case forever, basically.

And so Flexner, his personal lawyer, went around to medical schools, wrote up a big report.

Congress approved it.

And that has been the document that has essentially been used to accredit medical schools since then.

So over 100 years.

And it essentially demonized and almost criminalized anything that could be considered like holistic, alternative, holistic care.

And this is when food, as a, as, you know, Hippocrates, you know, had talked about food as medicine, you know, thousands of years ago.

And, and we, we've just lost, we lost all of that almost instantly and actually disincentivized it.

Like it could be problematic and you could be liable if you did that.

So So medical schools, it's it's entrenched in our system to move away from anything that's like holistic or preventative or food as medicine.

Then

you follow the money.

So when I was at Stanford Medical School in 2011, Stanford accepted a $3 million grant from Pfizer for curriculum development.

And if you actually go online and Google like Stanford,

$3 million grant Pfizer and look at all the news from that era, it says all over the articles, this grant came with no strings attached.

There was no influence under from Pfizer on what was going to go into the curriculum.

But it's like, if you accept a $3 million grant from Pfizer, do we really think that's not going to have an influence on what students are going to learn?

We're not going to then go and really have a discerning curriculum about opioid use and things like that, vaccines, because that just, that wouldn't jive with the relationships that are happening between, you know, the Kale lobby isn't paying Stanford, the exercise lobby, the resistance training.

So it's like who you become.

You know, I've never seen personally firsthand, like any sort of overt kind of bribery, but you have to really, the way life is relationship-based.

And when you have relationships

with different groups, like it's going to subtly and insidiously impact like what is favored and what's not.

I'll never forget in my surgical training, like we are, you know, as residents, you're working all the time, you're making like $50,000 a year, you're working 80 to 100 hours a week, and you're just trying to get by.

And these drug reps and device reps would come and say, hey, we would love to take you guys all out to Fogo de Chao and have this $100 meal and unlimited wine.

And we'll just, we'll give you like a 10 minute presentation about our nasal stent.

It's like this steroid emitting nasal stent.

And we're just like, we'll go to dinner.

That sounds great.

Like we're so excited.

And so, you know, and we're like, oh yeah, of course we would never be biased by this dinner.

But you go and you become friends with the reps and you start to get.

all that research fed to you.

And you're like, wow, the research is actually pretty good on the outcomes for this.

And, you know, and I really like the person who took us out to dinner.

And then they're texting with you and they're trying to help you out with different different things and send you more information.

And the next thing you know, you're in the operating room and you're done with your sinus surgery and you're like, I should put a steroid-emitting nasal scent in here.

So it's not overt.

It's insidious.

But imagine that then on every level, on every level of how our research is done, how our curriculums are defined.

And you kind of start to see how things.

really default to like, where is the money and where is the resources?

And not necessarily in a nefarious way, but that's the way, that's the way business works.

That's how it's the way relationships work.

Yeah, that's how life works.

I remember applying to colleges.

If you had an alumni parent that was a donor, I mean, your chances of getting in were probably higher.

Let's be honest.

So that's just how life works.

Yeah.

So we just have to be aware of that and just start to ask questions like, why?

Like, why are people and doctors getting made fun of online or in the media for like talking about whether vitamin D or healthy diets and exercise are a good strategy for building resilience during COVID?

Why are those people being demonized?

You know, why is that so dangerous to ask?

And yet it was.

We saw that play out in COVID.

And it's because it's against a really large multi-trillion dollar agenda that fundamentally requires people to be disempowered about their health and to get sick and then require people to swoop in and save them.

Yeah.

So now I think ages zero to 18, they're requiring 100 vaccines for public school, something around there.

It's in the like 70 plus range.

Yeah.

How do you feel about that many going into children?

I think it's astonishing.

So, I mean, I have, I have so many thoughts about vaccines, but I think that one thing we need to realize is that that number has gone up exponentially in the past 30 or 40 years.

Like I think in the 70s, maybe like four were required.

I mean, that should be fact checked, but it's like it has gone up monumentally.

And then in 1986, there was a law passed that provided legal immunity for vaccine manufacturers for harm.

So yeah, this is, this is a lot of what Bobby Kenny is talking about.

So there is a law that basically you cannot sue a a pharmaceutical company for harm from a vaccine what they did instead was they created a fund through the government that's essentially pays out like claims based on um if people feel that they've had a vaccine scene injury, they can submit information and part of this fund, you can get paid out for these vaccine injuries.

So what it did is it's essentially, from what I understand, taxpayer money goes into a fund that probably very stingily pays out.

I'm sure most of these claims are denied, but the manufacturers have immunity to lawsuits.

Crazy.

Isn't that crazy?

And then

you've got 75% of the FDA's drug budget is coming from pharma.

So pharma pays 75%

of the FDA's budget for their drug portion because it's the Food and Drug Administration.

So the drug portion, 75% is paid.

So the people who they are regulating are paying their bills.

So then that's another interesting piece of the puzzle.

Then you've got the connection with, you know, the CDC and the school mandates.

And you say to states, okay, well, you know, to be able to go to school or basically do any activities, we mandate CDC vaccine schedule for kids to go to school.

So you've got this really weird system where the regulatory body is paid for by the companies they're regulating, like Pfizer.

There is complete and utter legal immunity for any wrongdoing from a pharmaceutical manufacturer.

And we're mandating families to do every single vaccine for their kids to do basically anything.

That does not seem like a good system.

No.

Because it, it, it,

first of all, there's no medication in the world that doesn't have side effects and is not going to have some level of adverse events.

And when that happens, like we should be able to report it.

That should be, we should understand that.

We should study that.

And if a lot of those things are happening, a country should, a company should absolutely be liable for that to change their ways.

So then the second piece of the picture, as I think about it, is that, you know,

we've got certain vaccines that are life-saving, I think, and that have had a huge impact on public health.

You think about like polio, like that's, that's probably one that's had a really good impact.

But then you look at something like the Hep B series, which is three vaccines, one of which is given on the first day of life in America.

So the baby is born.

The baby comes, you know, from source into the world.

And first thing they're experiencing on planet Earth is being jabbed with Hep B.

So you would think if that's the case, that's how we're going to introduce people to life, that it would be like existential that kids get this vaccine.

The only way that babies get Hep B is through sexual, it's a sexually transmitted disease.

So sexual contact with someone who has Hep B or IV drug use.

Wow.

So the average, and they test mothers for Hep B.

So of course, if there's a baby who may be at high risk or to be exposed to that, sure.

But for every baby in in the United States, when every medication in the world has some level of side effects and adverse events and will cause death in some people, every medication, especially if we're doing it that level.

So it makes absolutely no sense that you would not screen out the majority of babies who just do not need this vaccine.

But if you think about it from the bigger picture level and what the pharmaceutical companies want, if you can get a parent to think that this is so necessary for us to do on the first day of life.

I'm a bad parent if I don't put this in my baby's body.

If you get them in that grip of control and of feeling like they associate being a good parent with following this stuff to the letter, you've got them for life.

And then you can't, and then of course you create an entire media strategy to basically blacklist, shame any mother, any person who questions anything about this.

You look at what happened to Jenny McCarthy when she spoke out about vaccines 20 years ago.

She was literally excommunicated from Hollywood for doing that.

So it's just a fascinating.

And what's so interesting is that it's actually, I don't even think it's a good PR strategy for, because what's happening is that people are starting to realize it's strange that we can't ask questions and that something feels wrong about that.

If we could actually have a real discussion about something linked vaccines and actually talk about which ones are maybe higher risk, which ones are lower risk, which ones are most important, which ones are less important, and trust that people are smart enough to make good decisions with nuance.

I think you'd have a lot more trust for our public health agencies.

New data has come out that less than 31% of Americans now trust their doctors.

That's down from about 70% pre-COVID.

So this is the moment where actually the good PR strategy for the CDC and the NIH and the FDA and the pharmaceutical companies would be encouraging nuanced discussions about these things because people are understanding, especially after COVID, that there is actually this almost like agenda to eliminate nuance in order to have sort of blanket top-down control over healthcare.

And that's not necessarily,

I think that from a,

I'm not going to put any nefarious sort of implications on that.

I think if you're a person at the CDC and your job is to actually really try and make sure that everyone in America, you really believe in vaccines and you think that that's the thing, like for instance, for COVID, that everyone needs to get vaccinated, your strategy is going to be to try and tell people that like it's 100% safe and we shouldn't ask questions about it.

Unfortunately, that backfired because

even though I think they assumed that Americans are sheep, I think a lot of people showed that they're not willing to be treated that way.

And I think that's a good thing.

Yeah, that awareness is the first step.

I remember in high school, I was a cross-country runner.

We had to get vaccines.

I didn't even question it at the time, to be honest.

But now at least people are aware of like, okay, why am I putting this in my body?

Yeah.

And questioning something is not being an anti-vaxxer.

That's just such a funny, it's such a funny thing that we're in where if like you even, if you question the 72 shots that are being jammed in your child over the course of 18 years, you're an anti-vaxxer.

That doesn't make sense.

Why can't we ask why?

Why can't we just look at the data?

If the data were great, I think we'd all do it.

If it were really effective and had no side, what is the danger in asking why?

And yet that's the culture we're in right now, where if you even dare to ask why,

you are labeled something that we consider shameful in this society.

That should make us all scratch our heads.

So, so my viewpoint is not anything about being like, I don't believe in vaccines.

I think vaccines can be life-saving.

I'm a physician.

I mean, there's, but, but there's nothing in the world that we should not be able to ask questions about without being ridiculed and shamed.

If that's happening, we should especially question it.

And it is happening.

It is.

I'm seeing an increase in home births and wellness center births.

Yeah.

That's, it's amazing.

And it's like, it's, that's my dream.

I mean, it's great because people at hospitals are getting in fights with the nurses because they don't want the vaccines in their babies.

Yeah.

I think it's, it's the vaccine issue.

Um, and it's also, I think there's a really interesting like awakening happening with women and families around around how birth has been so commoditized and industrialized.

And it's become almost this thing that a lot of women are dealing with like birth trauma because of how they're being treated when they give birth.

This, this pharmaceutical, I mean, this, this healthcare system coming in and essentially creating a situation in which women are petrified to give birth.

I grew up, you know, being very scared about birth.

Like, oh my God, it's going to be the most painful thing that's ever happened in my life.

And I want, I spent many years of my life thinking, like, I just want a scheduled C-section.

I just want to be put under.

I just want the baby to come out safely.

That's the best thing I can do for everyone.

This is terrible.

And as I've learned more about the healthcare system and about the levers of control that the healthcare system tries to implement, which is essentially fear to get people to do anything.

I've realized that there's actually a totally different story with birth that I think needs to be told.

There's an amazing documentary called The Business of Being Born that was done by Ricky Lake about 20 years ago talking about the big business of birth.

And if you can get women scared, fearful, and disempowered, they are so profitable.

in birth.

And there's been, just like with the Flexner report, there's been a huge movement to demonizing midwives, doulas, natural forms of pregnancy.

And again, if you're a woman who says that's what you want to do, people say, you're so selfish.

What about the baby?

When in fact, a lot of the data shows that it is that in a low-risk pregnancy with a very qualified midwife and care team, things like home births and out-of-hospital births at birth centers are as safe or more safe than giving birth in a hospital.

In America right now, we have the lowest,

we have the highest infant and maternal mortality more i'll just say that hard in america we have the highest infant and maternal mortality rates of any developed country in the world.

And our C-section rate in the United States in some hospitals is 70%.

There is some amount of C-sections that are medically necessary, but experts think that that's probably between somewhere like 5% and 12%, like where it's actually can be life-saving.

70 is.

But 70,

think about a C-section for this, like from the standpoint of a doctor, probably less liability.

You know, it's just like a sterile procedure, cut it out.

You know, it's quicker.

You don't have to wait for all the, you know, uncertainties of the birth process.

Schedule it, cut it out, done.

Go back to your golf game.

And you don't have, yeah, you don't have to deal with any of the complexity or the mystery of it.

And so it feels more controllable.

But we know that there are many aspects of C-sections that are actually less favorable for both the mother and the baby.

Like pregnancy is a, or delivery is a complex cascade of hormones that ultimately leads to a baby being born.

And if you circumvent those, it has an impact for the mother for things like being able to breastfeed, development of postpartum depression, attachment to the baby, things like that.

And for the baby, they're not getting the vaginal microbiome as they come out the birth canal.

And so when the baby goes to the birth canal,

that is how you actually seed the infant's microbiome through the vaginal floor of the mother.

And so you're totally bypassing that by doing a C-section.

And we know that higher C-section rates are associated with further risk of future risk of cardiometabolic diseases down the road because, of course, the baby's microbiome is going to be different.

So all that is to say, when you start undoing the thread of some of these things that we've really normalized in our culture, like hospitalized, industrialize, commoditized births, and start to ask some questions, like this doesn't really seem to be benefiting.

us the way that we thought it would.

And you start asking those questions and ultimately, just like with everything else, it kind of gets back to money.

And as a woman who's thinking about having kids in the next year or so, as I've gone down that road and understood the turf wars between midwives and OBGYNs and people like fighting essentially for those dollars with each pregnancy, you start to realize that there's actually dark underbelly of the birth industry that I think is

my, my, one thesis I'm really working with right now is like, I actually think that's one of the root, root causes we're sick.

Because if you can, if you can capture and

disempower the way that we're actually being brought into the world, then you really have people for life.

Like if you can really create fear around the moment that could be the most powerful spiritual moment of a family's life,

then

you kind of have people.

And if, and if you, if you let people have the spiritual journey and let people experience going through that gauntlet and coming out the other side with, you know,

empowerment, like that person is likely going to be a little bit more fearless in their life.

And that could be dangerous for people who are interested in control of populations.

So I just think about what would it be like for women, right?

Women are struggling right now.

25% of women are on SSRI.

And,

you know, I think it's,

I just do wonder if we actually changed our birth culture in this country,

what that would actually do for like the sense of deep feminine power that could benefit everyone in society.

It would be massive.

My fiancé is really scared, like you said earlier, she's really fearful of having a children, having a child.

Well, my biggest recommendation is to start to follow, like probably both of you guys, like 20 home birth Instagram accounts.

Or there's a whole movement, and this is kind of crazy, not to go, and this is not the direction I know we were playing on going in this episode, but like there's a whole, there's a whole movement of orgasmic birth, which is kind of fascinating.

Yeah, there's actually a documentary called Orgasmic Birth.

And throughout history, a lot of more indigenous and traditions actually believed that the process of birth could be genuinely orgasmic, like orgasm going in, orgasm going out.

It's kind of wild.

And so, but have you ever heard about that?

Ever?

Orgasmic birth?

No.

I hadn't.

And yet there's some like percentage of women in the United States who are still having that experience.

Like, I think it's close to 10%.

We don't talk about it because think about how weird that would be to talk about with people.

It's like, oh, did that even happen?

Like, what's it?

But the reality is that there is a mindset and there is a path that I think is physical, emotional, spiritual, relational that we could be going on in this process that could lead the way we're brought into the world to be ecstatic for all parties involved.

And I think that it has been completely beaten out of our culture, probably on purpose, because

if that were part of the common discourse, you'd have a lot of people opting out of the system and the industrialized way of doing it, which is sterile, and which really isn't conducive to physiologic birth.

One of the things that is really required for the hormonal milieu of birth to happen properly is actually a sense of safety and comfort and darkness.

You think about a lot of animals, mammals, they actually give birth in caves.

So you want it to be dark and safe and nurturing.

But what does it look like for birth in the United States?

Fluorescent lights, strangers walking in and out of the room, you know, not able to like cuddle or be intimate with your partner.

So women have their labors essentially stall.

And because their body, the hormonal milieu that's required to dilate the cervix and to actually make everything happen gets thwarted by just the conditions of being in a hospital.

And then they say, you need Pitocin.

So they inject you with Pitocin, which is a thing that stimulates, induces birth basically.

Well, what is Pitocin?

Pitocin is synthetic oxytocin.

What is oxytocin?

It's the hormone that's released when you feel safe and when you're like snuggling with your partner.

It's the snuggle comfort hormone.

So so interesting.

This is like definitional of how we're operating in America.

We prevent conditions in which someone can secrete their own oxytocin and then we inject them with it.

And there are a lot of side effects with using synthetic pitocin versus natural oxytocin.

And so if we just kind of like thought about all this stuff, I just, I really do think it could change the world.

You'd empower families and you'd also empower partners because like with you and your fiancé, if you think about it, if a partner is and the intimacy and the touch and the cuddling can actually help the woman secrete oxytocin, then in a way it gives you a role in the birth to actually help her body produce the hormones that are needed to dilate the cervix to get the baby out safely.

Right.

But men don't think about that.

Like they have a key role to play in safely getting the baby out by stimulating her hormones.

And right now, we don't even empower men with that role of like, how can you be a part of this?

We just say

the labor has stalled.

Here's Pitocin.

So, anyways, this is like, I think it's, um, it's, it's, it's, it's definitely a part of why we're sick: is that our birth culture is, is pretty sick.

Yeah, it's super important.

I mean, that's where it starts, right?

Yeah.

You're born in these bright lights.

Here's three vaccines.

That's right.

You're off on your way now.

Your eyes are smeared with

erythromycin ointment the second you're born.

Um,

literally, you're brought out of the womb.

You are aggressively rubbed with towels.

You're given a bath and all this antimicrobial vernix that you were born with that has a purpose is washed off.

You're injected.

ointments put in your eyes um and you're separated from your mother crazy and five thousand dollar bill

way more than that more yeah probably order of magnitude yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and most families can't really afford that so it's wild

and we have the worst worst outcomes of any developed country yeah even though we're one of the wealthiest going on yeah yeah it's crazy and you said 20 of our gdp is in big pharma now is in healthcare healthcare yeah

and birth is a big part of that i bet yeah birth and probably like surgeries right Surgeries, pills, hospital visits, hospital stays.

A lot of that money is spent at end-of-life care.

So in those last couple years of really like emergency late stage manifestations of chronic disease,

so many of which are preventable, right?

If we actually prevented the chronic disease in the first place.

Yeah.

I wonder what the middle ground is because we can't just wipe it out completely.

Everyone would lose their jobs, you know?

Yeah, I think it's going to be, it's a good question.

It's like, what is the sequence of events that would take us to kind of get back to a more rational

system?

I think the first thing that I think about is just like, we have to get the conflicts of interest out of

the healthcare system at the federal level.

Like when you've got the NIH, the FDA, the USDA, and the CDC all totally embedded with financial

conflicts of interest, then everything kind of trickles down from that.

Like the way the research is done, the way the drugs are are approved, the way mandates and public health priorities are made.

So that would be like a simple thing to gently start the process of just cleaning up even the information that we're getting.

Right.

So I think it was just getting the conflicts out of the federal agencies that control our food and health would be one start that I think would have a really positive trickle down.

Yeah, because people don't even know who to trust.

Right.

Like when they see FDA on the product, does that actually mean anything?

Yeah.

Right.

You know what I mean?

I think the distrust in our agencies is higher than ever.

And like, I think COVID was a big part of that because something just felt wrong about the way that it was managed.

And I think it was just a generational mistake that they chose to ignore the.

the modifiable factors of our life that could have helped us build resilience to COVID and instead just talked about like three things social distancing masks and vaccines none of which had to do with empowerment it had to do with separation and intervention when in fact the data was really showing us that like if you were metabolically healthy if you just had good foundational health which is built on real food, exercise, sleep, stress management, avoidance of toxins, and getting the right nutrients like vitamin D, that you would have an almost negligible chance of dying from COVID.

COVID, in a sense, was a metabolic, the fatalities from COVID were fundamentally a metabolic problem because the countries that are more metabolically healthy had vastly lower death rates.

We fared so much worse because our underlying health was so poor.

Wow.

But that was never talked about.

And people realize that.

And thank God for independent media, like podcasts, like the Joe Rogans of the world, people like you.

I know the podcast wasn't around in the beginning of COVID, but you know, who actually were able to talk about this stuff.

And that's why I worry a lot about topics around freedom of speech.

Cause it's like, if you, if you lose the ability to even talk about these other concepts, then I'm really worried.

But, like, the fact that 200 million people were listening to Joe Rogan every month, who was talking about things like foundational metabolic health and having people like

Sanjay Gupta and Peter Hotez on, and like asking them hard questions about this, like that's that's the beauty of our culture is that we still are able to have these conversations, even if the system is broken.

And so, um,

yeah, you know, I think, again, it's like

the people in control are afraid of nuance.

And I think the American people are rejecting that.

Yeah, I remember during COVID, there was just so much fear, even myself.

Yeah.

Like, I didn't know what to do.

And if it wasn't for podcasts and alternative media, I mean, they could have easily just flipped the switch and had more control.

Yeah.

So, so podcasts and things like that were also part of your sort of COVID learning.

If you just watched the news during COVID, I mean,

it was so negative.

So that would just be your whole life from there on.

The CNN technical director was caught on undercover camera just like bragging about, oh yeah, if it bleeds, it leads on CNN, you know, like essentially how fearful, how fear-inducing can we make the headlines?

Because people are going to be glued to it and they're going to be scared and then they're going to do all the things.

They're going to look for any of the,

you know, salvation in the shot or the masks or the hand sanitizer or the Clorox, the social distancing, distancing.

If you can make people fearful, you can sell them the solution.

And that revolving door, like, it just wasn't the full story.

There were other, there were other things we could do, you know, not necessarily saying like, people shouldn't get the vaccine, people shouldn't wear the mask, but it's like there was a lot of other area that we could intervene on that just wasn't talked about because

it plants this, I think the fear was it would plant a seed in people's heads that,

oh, maybe I don't, I don't need the vaccine if I do all this other stuff.

And that was such a scary thought that they silenced it.

And I think it backfired.

That's what happened.

Do you have any faith in in this Maha movement?

Do you think I could get some changes done?

I mean, I think we're in such a funny time, two weeks before the election, right?

And I think it's never been more polarized.

But the way I see it is like everyone should be happy that there's a Maha movement, Make America Healthy Again.

Because at the end of the day, no matter who wins, for the first time, in my lifetime that I can remember, we have people at the presidential level talking about things like regenerative agriculture, talking about things like soil quality, forever chemicals, microplastics, you know, PFAS, BPA, chronic diseases, these environmental aspects of our health.

And I think like that, again, the cat is out of the bag.

And so

because it's in the zeitgeist at the highest level of politics, two out of the three candidates, really, Bobby Kennedy and Trump are talking about this and people are responding to it.

So there's leverage there.

There's movement there.

So no matter who wins, it's now part of the zeitgeist at that level.

And I think that's good for everyone, no matter what.

The saddest outcome would be that if, you know, Trump and Bobby Kennedy don't win, that because it was sort of more associated with right-sided politics during the election, that in some way it gets demonized, you know.

But I think the brightest possible outcome would be that no matter who wins, the realization that people care about this and it's actually very powerful, a very powerful thread in the American consciousness right now that anyone takes it and pulls it forward but but given the amount of media that's around it right now which is essentially rooted in what are the root causes of why americans are sick and why aren't we addressing them i think that's good for everybody yeah yeah i remember when all these causes were conspiracy theories like the 5g the chemtrails oh my gosh and now it's just like yeah this happened Yeah, I can't really do anything.

Yeah.

You know?

Yeah.

The chemtrails thing I just find so interesting.

I'm just like, it's so interesting.

I was actually, because I don't know if when you're in LA, I don't know if it happens in Vegas, but right now in LA, the entire sky is just

Vegas.

It's just, it's everywhere.

It's, it's astonishing.

And the idea is that this is just the condensed, um, the condensed, the, the, the condensed water vapor that comes out of airplanes.

And that's sure, maybe that's true.

And then in a low humidity area, it persists for longer.

Fair enough.

This is just normal water vapor coming out of airplanes.

So, I was reading like five or six articles from mainstream media, like The Guardian and BBC.

Basically, universally, if you Google chemtrails, you're going to see only articles that say, like, this is a debunked conspiracy theory.

And that's fine, maybe it is.

But what I'm astonished by is that there is actually a government report written by the White House.

You can go on whitehouse.gov and look this up.

And there is a whole program called Stratospheric Aerosolized injections.

Have you heard about this, SAI?

So

it's a program.

And I'm telling you, you can literally go to the White House website and look at this report, SAI.

And the idea behind it, it's the climate change mitigation strategy.

And the idea is that you would have airplanes and other, you know, aerial vehicles spray out.

an aerosolized injection of things like

nanoparticulized heavy metals.

So things like aluminum and other metals, and that as they're in the air, they may have a role in reflecting back solar energy.

So you reduce the amount of heat that's actually coming down to Earth.

And it could be a climate mitigation strategy.

That's the idea

behind SAI.

And what I find fascinating is that in all of the, and I actually don't know what that would look like.

I don't know if it would be on commercial airplanes.

You can't get a lot of information about SAI, but the White House is studying it and it is being purported as one of the strategies we could use.

You know, you've also heard about they want to put mirrors in space to reflect the sun back into space.

And then there's cloud brightening techniques where they basically

essentially adjust cloud chemistry to reflect more light.

All of it's to reduce heat coming to Earth.

And so

even if that were a good strategy, I find it funny that in all the articles about debunking the conspiracy theories of chemtrails, none of them talk about the very real program that's being maybe implemented.

I don't actually know if it's actually happening right now or it's at least being studied and proposed by the White House for SAI, which is essentially,

it's essentially would-be chemtrails, right?

It's something being sprayed into our atmosphere with metals in it.

And we know some of those metals are neurotoxic, like aluminum.

And there's no discussion in that document about safety.

So

to me, as I'm just an American sitting here thinking about what's going on in the country, I'm like, First of all, why is all of Legacy Media intent on calling this a conspiracy theory?

Why do none of those articles actually talk talk about the real program going on with SAI and how those two things might be linked?

I don't have the answers.

I'm just asking questions, but it's like, it's just a little weird that

we're saying it's a conspiracy theory when there's actually like a White House program looking at injecting things into the atmosphere for climate change.

It's super weird.

And you can use testers yourself and just see, like measure the atmosphere and the results are pretty bad.

Oh, I haven't gotten into that.

Like there's testing things.

You could just go outside.

Like there's been a lot of wildfires and you could see the meters is off.

Wow.

You know, and I have air filters at home.

And some days when there's fires, like it's, it's really bad.

Yeah.

Interesting.

There's been a lot of fires in Cali.

Tons.

It's just super weird to me.

It's super interesting.

Yeah.

There's a lot.

I mean, it does seem like there's a lot of pretty intense weather events happening, you know, and I think

when I think about the chronic disease epidemic that's going on in human bodies right now, like Fundamentally,

a lot of what's causing us to be sick right now with metabolic dysfunction is chronic inflammation.

You know, know, it's like the body's immune system is really revved up because there's all these new threats in the body.

That's one of the key root causes of metabolic dysfunction, is chronic inflammation.

And it's just so interesting to see like what's happening in the body reflected on planet Earth in a sense.

It's like we have so much inflammation in the discourse that we're all talking about.

Like there's inflammation and the polarization of viewpoints right now that the algorithm is fueling.

There's inflammation in the body.

And then it's almost like there's inflammation in our environment in the sense that, you know, we've got a destroyed ecosystem.

The ecosystem of the body and the earth are meant to be harmonious, like not 100%,

like no adversarial aspects to it, but fundamentally harmonious.

And now it's almost like it's not harmonious in culture, it's not harmonious in the body, and it's not harmonious in the environment.

And so what we're really seeing fundamentally is a broken harmony of an ecosystem because we've tried to exert too much.

sort of artificial control over it.

And it's basically on every level, the body, the earth, culture pushing back, saying like,

we will not be controlled and we will flare up if this continues.

And it's just, I think we should be looking at all of this as signals that like we are intervening in a way that the earth and the body are both rejecting and saying, this is not the way we operate.

We are nature.

Like do not mess with us because we will get fired up.

And we're kind of seeing that on every level.

You've seen that on every level.

Average IQ is down.

Average lifespan is down in the U.S.

I mean, it's everywhere.

The The lifespan stuff is so astonishing.

I mean, I cannot believe this is not front page news.

There was research from the Journal of the American Medical Association from last November that showed the average life expectancy for a man in the United States today is 73 years old.

That is so low.

If we were in Switzerland or Japan, that number is 10 years higher, 83 and 84.

So Americans, life expectancy has been going down for the past three years.

And the main causes for that are COVID, chronic liver disease, heart disease, and drug overdoses, and suicide.

So people easily write this off saying, that's an artifact of COVID.

But when you remember that COVID was fundamentally a metabolic disease, the people who died from COVID was because of actually underlying conditions rooted in our diet and lifestyle, then the majority of the reason why our life expenses is going down is not actually just an infectious disease.

It's actually the underlying lifestyle-related disease.

So it is our environment that is causing our life expenses to go down.

And other countries did not take that life expensive hit.

They're staying stable, even though COVID was a global phenomenon.

And so it's amazing how easily people write off that data to, oh, it was COVID.

It was just an anomaly, but it's persisting.

And I think if you're a man in America seeing that statistics, 73.

I mean, that seems, I know so many 80-year-olds who seem like spring chickens.

Like that's really, really, really young.

And that should be front page news.

We've got life expectancy going down.

We've got infertility going up 1% a year.

What do we think the end game is here?

What is going on?

Our world is hostile to life on both ends, on fertility and on life expectancy.

And we are purportedly the smartest, most advanced, richest country in the world, and we can't even keep life expectancy stable.

Why aren't we talking about this?

You know, and I think it's the longevity conversation is fascinating.

And I love a lot of people in the longevity space, but it's a lot about hacks and and protocols and optimization.

I'm like, we're missing, we're missing the, we're missing the plot here.

Like we don't need to talk about getting to 100.

We need to talk about getting to 75.

Like it's going the wrong direction.

And we know that's because of environmental factors.

And so that's really, I mean, that should be a headline story.

Until we fix the infertility crisis and the life assembly crisis, what else should be on the front page of the newspaper?

Right.

Yeah, this should be talked about way more.

And big food is starting to get questioned, which is good.

Yeah.

You go to the grocery store now, almost everything there is toxic in a way, right?

Yeah.

I mean, people often ask me, like, what's the number one thing of anything that you could do to be healthier today?

What would it be?

And I would actually say it's, it's not only buy real food, it's buy all your food at a farmer's market.

Because even in a grocery store, a lot of the food, the fresh food is compromised.

I mean, obviously we say like, shop on the perimeter, just get the meat and the eggs and the vegetables and the fruits.

But even in a conventional grocery store, a a lot of that food has traveled.

The average piece of food in the United States travels 1,500 miles from farm to your plate.

And I think what people need to realize is that like every moment a piece of produce is away from its source in soil, when it's picked off the vine, it's dead.

It dies in that moment.

And every day and every mile it's traveling away from the soil, it's dying a little bit more.

And the nutrients are being lost and the proteins are being denatured.

So even though they might try and spruce it up with like the wax that they put on apples and all of these different things, there's now the appeal chemical that they're putting on it.

You are fundamentally eating a food that has lost some of its life force.

So no surprise that we're all dying a little bit earlier than we need to be.

We're eating dead food.

Then you look at ultra-processed food, which has been depleted of all of its life force, right?

You've literally stripped away an average piece of like

fresh whole food from the ground has tens of thousands of individual chemicals inside of it, chemicals from nature that work with our cellular biology to create health, to create function.

When you put it through ultra-processing, you're losing all of that magic.

And so you're eating a food that truly has lost its life force.

And that's ultra-processed foods are now 67% of the calories that we're eating today.

So we eat like 50 metric tons of food in our lifetime.

50 metric tons.

And that is constantly re 3D printing our body.

Every day we're turning over cells.

Every single day, you have like 600 billion cells that die and are reborn.

We're constantly dying and regenerating every day of our lives.

The way we re-3D print our body every day is with food.

That's the printer ink to the 3D printer.

And so if we're putting 67% of those 50 metric tons is trash, essentially, that's nutrient depleted.

doesn't have all the magical phytonutrients and micronutrients and macronutrients we need to build a healthy body, of course we're going to get sick.

You're building a skyscraper out of shoddy subpar materials.

It's going to to fall.

You know, so that's when I say shop at the farmer's market, basically what I, first of all, there's 9,000 farmers markets in the U.S.

now.

It's not actually that hard to find a farmer's market.

It takes a little effort, but we should be getting our priorities straight in the U.S.

Like we're really sick.

We need to invest some more time in this and maybe even some more money.

But you kill like 10 birds with one stone by getting your food at the farmer's market.

First, it's going to be fresher.

They picked it that day or the day before.

It just came out of the earth.

You can eat it that day or you can freeze some of it or put it in your fridge.

That'll maintain some of the nutrients.

But it's not going to be two weeks old or three weeks old, like something you buy in the grocery store.

Two, you can talk to the farmer.

Say, how is the food grown?

Are there pesticides?

Do you use synthetic pesticides?

Do you use glyphosate?

What do you do for pest control?

They'll tell you.

You can know how much toxin is on your food.

You know, most of the food in the grocery store is just literally covered in visible toxins, even if it's a piece of produce.

So talk to the farmer, get to know them.

I think.

The third piece is that you're actually walking around outside while you're shopping for your food and we need to be outside way more than we are today.

Like the sun controls our circadian biology and the average American is spending 93% of their time indoors now.

And so our circadian biology is all screwed up.

So while you're doing, you know, a weekly task, you're actually outside and moving around.

So that's a good one.

And then the last piece, I think it's like, it's spiritually fulfilling.

Connecting with the person who's creating the food that's going to become the atoms of your body of tomorrow.

That's an important relationship to have.

And being disconnected from our food, which is what makes our body, makes our neurotransmitters, makes our hormones, physically builds them, that disconnection from our food, food, I think, is part of why we feel so disconnected in our lives, because we're totally disconnected from the thing that creates our bodies and minds.

I love all of that.

Yeah.

There's some good markets out here.

Oh my God.

Calabasas has a good one.

Well, I haven't been to Calabasas.

It's a good one.

Santa Monica, Mar Vista, you know, Pacific Palace.

It's incredible.

And we're so lucky in L.A.

How's Vegas for farmers?

Not as good, unfortunately.

We're in a desert, but I still go to Summerlin.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I try to support local businesses.

And yeah, the food's way fresher.

And all these outbreaks lately are weird to me, like this listeria outbreak and like the deli meats and there's been another one this week it's very weird it's really concerning how they're treating our food systems really fragile right now it's too centralized and i think there's really there's a concerted war on like small farmers and a real push to centralization like there's four companies that control i think 85 of all the meat that's sold in the united states it's like very monopolized.

And what that does is it creates pressures on small farmers where, you know, they are, it's very difficult to compete.

And then you put huge amounts of regulation on these farmers that just become so onerous that a lot of them just have to turn over their farms to the big conglomerates, basically.

And, you know, you think about like the American dream and you think about what the founding fathers initially wanted for our country, which is like really tight control over federal overreach, which is has totally, I mean.

I think the government was responsible for two things when America was started.

And now there's like 470 federal agencies.

They touch every part of our life from postal to medical to infrastructure to food safety.

It's like, we need to remember that like originally the idea was not for the government to actually regulate everything.

Right.

And

that the government is also a business with a lot of jobs and a lot of job security.

And so it's like, why do we have all of this?

And I just, I look at food now and how all I want is to be able to have a free relationship between me and a farmer that I know.

And for me as a human to be able to use my own judgment and my own risk calculation to decide who am I buying my food from and what am I willing to risk.

So am I okay with the fact that this man that I know and I've seen his farm is butchering that cow and giving me that?

I'm okay with that.

I've looked at it.

I've talked to him.

That's illegal right now.

That can't happen.

That person, you cannot.

You cannot buy from an individual farmer.

That farmer has to send their meat out to a USDA approved slaughterhouse.

Wow.

I can't buy raw milk, right?

Like raw milk milk is going to have,

you know, an unpasteurized milk that hasn't been heated.

It's going to have a whole different set of enzymes and proteins and all these different things

that kind of get zapped when you pasteurize the milk.

And it's like, why as an American am I not allowed to make the choice?

Like you're forcing to buy health care in case something goes wrong.

There's a mandate for that.

So why can't I make decisions about my own food with my own judgment for my own family?

But that's not allowed in this country right now.

There's like a black market for raw milk.

It's insanity.

So,

you know, I think we really need to take a step back and really think about,

and I frankly, I think this is why you're seeing sort of like a populist movement and you're seeing a lot of people

supporting more conservative ideology.

And I think people are feeling stuck right now because it's like, okay, well, maybe they don't like Trump, but they don't, they do want someone to stand up to corporate capture of regulatory agencies.

But, and so it's this funny time right now where it's almost like everyone's feeling a little like, it's not quite right, but like, what's the solution?

But I do think like regulation has gotten out of hand and

undermines some of the values

that were so foundational to how this country was started, which was to be able to have the liberty to make our own decisions in our life and do our own risk calculations.

But it's almost like the concept of risk has been weaponized against us where we almost say,

because we want there to be no risk, we're going to over control all these different aspects of society.

And yet there will always be risk and there will always be unforeseen outcomes of any highly regulated approach.

There will be different risks, you know?

So

that's a moment that I think we're sitting in right now.

And I think it's going to require more boldness on the individual level of speaking up about like all these things you know so yeah speaking of speaking up you just spoke at congress yes so i'd love to hear how that went and if they decided on anything yet this was a amazing event um it was hosted by ron johnson who had listened to the episode that callie and i did with tucker carlson and i think really was inspired by some of the messages and he said he called us up and we had a call and he said i this is we have to be talking about this this more on a bigger level.

Like, can we, can we put something together?

And so put together a group of health advocates, entrepreneurs, doctors, Chris Palmer from Harvard, Marty McCarry from Johns Hopkins, incredible group of people.

And just spent the entire day.

It was like four full hours of talking about

nutrition and chronic disease.

And what does the data really show?

And what are some solutions we could be, you know, moving towards?

And it was a packed house.

The entire room, the Kennedy room at the Senate was packed hours before the event.

There was an overflow room, I think, of like 2,000 people.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, people are ready for change when it comes to chronic disease.

People are looking at the stats.

Americans are getting destroyed across the lifespan from childhood to old age.

Everyone knows it's related to our toxic food system, which is totally compromised by corporate interests.

And people just showed up, I think, to really like support and learn.

And it was, it was, it was, I had chills the whole day.

It was really incredible to hear esteemed people like Chris Palmer and Marty McCarry talk about how even at the best institutions in the world, like Harvard and Johns Hopkins, like we're practicing bad medicine.

We're not actually following the science.

We're not practicing food as medicine.

We're letting people get sick and then we're swooping in with reactive whack-a-mole interventions.

And so that was what it was really about.

What are the root causes?

Unfortunately, Legacy Media, you know, came in guns blazing to basically mock the entire thing.

You had an article, I think, the next day in the Atlantic calling it the woo-woo caucus.

I didn't know that Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and Harvard were woo-woo.

She didn't even mention that there were doctors there, actually.

The author of the article, she said it was just an influencer event.

And several articles like that came out,

people calling it dangerous.

And, you know, I just always go back to the question, like, why is it dangerous to ask questions?

like, why?

Why are all these things happen?

Why are one in 22 children in California autistic?

Like, why are one in two Americans expected to get cancer in their lifetime?

Why are early onset dementia cases going up at

huge percentage points over the last few years?

What is going on?

And apparently that's woo-woo and dangerous.

But so, so, you know, I think there's a huge groundswell support.

And then there was sort of the expected

questioning and mocking from legacy media.

Wow.

One in two cancer.

I didn't know that.

One in two Americans are expected to get cancer in their lifetime.

Now, and young adult cancers, which means cancers under the age of 50, are up 79% in the past 10 years.

And

many of those cancers are of the GI track.

So like colorectal cancer.

We're seeing increases in

like liver cancer, pancreatic cancer, all sorts of cancers throughout the GI track.

And it's, you just think about some of these stats, like we're eating 67% of our calories from ultra-processed foods, and we have 10,000 chemicals allowed by the government in our food system right now in America, only 400 in Europe, 10,000 in the U.S., which have not been studied for safety.

And then you think, yeah, well, we would sort of expect that GI cancers would probably be going up if we have 10,000 unregulated chemicals in our food and 67% of our foods are non-nutritious, ultra-processed franken foods.

Yeah.

So, yeah, it's uh, the stats are not great.

Yeah.

I remember growing up eating all those cereals from the cartoon commercials, thinking it was healthy for you.

And then now there's glyphosate in it.

And

man, the Kellogg's petition is catching some ground, which is great.

400,000 signatures.

417,000 signatures.

Vonnie Hari is such a warrior, the food babe, who led the whole Kellogg's initiative.

She's been a warrior for 20 years focusing on this.

She delivered those petitions to Kellogg's.

They ignored her.

They did not.

There were dozens, if not hundreds of children there outside

protesting as well, who actually got up in front of thousands and spoke, just fearless children saying,

basically asking Kellogg's, what are you doing?

The astonishing thing about the whole Kellogg story is that Kellogg's is an American company, and yet the cereal for Americans, the fruit loops for Americans has vastly different ingredients than the ingredients they put in the fruit loops in countries around the world, which are much safer.

They color the fruit loops in Europe with vegetable and fruit extracts.

Like in some other countries, they use turmeric for the yellow and they use blueberry extract, these non-toxic natural sources.

In America, it's artificial petroleum-based food dyes like Red 40, which has known links to ADHD and behavioral issues in children and contains benzene, which is a carcinogenic chemical.

We also have BHT in our fruit loops in America and not in the other countries.

So it's just a question of why would an American corporation be putting known

health-destroying chemicals in children's food in the country that they're from and not countries around the world.

And ultimately it comes down to, I'm sure, profits and margins.

But that feels very anti-American to me from a corporation.

Like they know they're doing safe, the countries who

care more about things like food quality.

are not standing for this.

So they get a better product.

And I think what this petition and this rally at Battle Creek, Michigan said was, we also are not standing for this.

And so they ignored the entire thing.

They actually held up a whiteboard from the window inside that said, get off our lawn.

Whoa.

And this is to mothers and children in a peaceful protest with 400,000 signatures.

And so I think now really the next move is for people to actually boycott.

buying any Kellogg's products.

And that's really the ask is to look online, ask ChatGPT, what are all the products that Kellogg's makes and just stop buying them.

Because I think if this isn't going to get their attention, certainly their bottom line will.

That will force change if they're,

they're all about numbers, like you said.

So if their sales are down, they'll be forced to change the ingredients, right?

Hopefully.

I think they will, yes, if that can really happen, but that requires us to change our purchasing decisions and we should do that.

And they hooked these kids in with those commercials, man.

Those were viral.

Lucky Charms, Tricks for Kids, Cocoa Pebble.

$2 billion are spent targeting ultra-processed foods to kids on TV.

It's insane.

That's not legal in most other countries.

We actually create ads specifically to target children in this country.

It's just, it's.

Yeah, they create the mascots and put a, put an animal to the, to the food, right?

And then they pay people who kids admire, like Jason Kelly and

Jason Kelsey and Travis Kelsey and other athletes to rep these cereals and to say, oh, we love it.

And we ate them as kids and we turned out fine.

Well, two things.

The foods were different back then.

The ingredients were actually different when we were kids.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

They have totally, if you look at what cereals had in them 20, 30 years ago versus today, it's completely different ingredient lists.

The food has changed.

It's much more chemical filled.

The pesticides have changed.

We are spraying an astronomical amount of glyphosate and other a billion pounds per year on our farmland in the U.S.

And our general health is just poorer because of all the environmental things.

So the way that food is interacting with our body is different.

So it's not the same.

And that excuse, and also they say we ate this as kids and we turned out fine, but are we fine?

Our generation is very sick.

And so I just, I think that that rationale is, it's total BS.

Yeah, you got to be careful when you're promoting food brands or medical brands for sure.

Yeah.

When you got a huge audience, they also did Pfizer.

I don't know if you saw that.

I, I remember during COVID, right?

I was like, ah, that's weird.

And that one, I mean, I can kind of get behind more because I think for many people, like there was a deep and genuine belief that like.

we would be better off if everyone got vaccinated.

I think that was like a sincere belief on the part of many, many people.

How we could actually support sugar-filled, petroleum-based, dye-filled, BHT-filled, glyphosate-covered food for children who are getting destroyed in this country.

30% of kids now have pre-diabetes, 30% of kids now have pre-diabetes.

18% of kids now have fatty liver disease.

36% of 18-year-olds have a behavioral, mental, or emotional disorder.

Like, kids are not doing well.

One in 36 autism nationally, one in 22 in California.

Why in God's name would you be accepting money money to promote ultra-processed chemical-filled food to children?

Yeah, that's wow.

I wonder why Cali is so higher, so much higher than the average, one in 22.

That's interesting.

It's hard to know.

I mean,

I could theorize it's a very big agricultural state, so there's a ton of probably pesticide residue everywhere.

It is one of the only states without a religious or medical exemption for like you, there you can't have a

religious or personal exemption to vaccinations.

Really?

No.

So there's a lot of states where there are religious and medical exemptions, but in Cali, they've actually institutionalized that if a, I believe, if a doctor does more than five medical exemptions for vaccines per year, they're put on a watch list.

Whoa.

Yeah.

Because you hear rumors of stuff like that, but that's.

No, it's actually in, it's, it's, it's, that's, that is a regulation right now in California.

Crap.

So even though there is medical exemption, because of course you have to have medical exemption.

If a kid truly can't get a vaccine because of some issue they have, like there needs to be a way out of that.

But if they do more than five, they get on a watch list and start being monitored.

And so you've got that.

You've got

just all sorts of things.

I mean, you have to look into like, what are we serving to kids in schools in California in terms of like the Nashville School Lunch Program?

I don't know specifically, but just looking at all the different vectors, especially environmental toxins, what's happening with the plastics in California, the microplastics.

um

that's like a whole nother thing and then you know i personally haven't even gone down the emf road yet.

Like, oh my gosh, I haven't gone down that road.

Yeah.

But, you know, there's just all these different things that cumulatively,

you know, can lead to issues.

But

yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't totally, the reason I mentioned microplastics because there's been recent research that shows that

when you look at placentas under the microscope, in a recent study, 100% of placentas now have microplastics in them.

And the thought is, well, the placenta is kind of like a filter.

So

maybe it's like they all have microplastics in it because it's a filter.

So it's not getting to the baby.

But now additional research has shown that they're actually in the babies now.

So microplastics are being found in the meconium, which is like the first poop a baby takes.

It's called meconium, has microplastics in it.

You look at, and Dr.

Andrew Huberman just did a wonderful podcast on plastics, looking at all the research, but they've also discovered now that

these parts of the body that have kind of walls around them to really protect them, which is the brain, you've got the blood-brain barrier and then the testes for the sperm and also the women's eggs.

There are these special sort of

precious areas of the body that we want to keep really safe biologically.

So there are these barriers around them.

And they've actually found that there are lots of microplastics in the brain.

And we're finding microplastics in sperm and in follicles.

So in the eggs, like before they're even fertilized,

they're everywhere.

And we know that they have huge biologic effects, endocrine hormone disrupting.

They can actually microplastics and get into our mitochondria.

We've now actually found microplastics in the mitochondria that create the energy for our cells.

So it's not fully understood how this is affecting our health, but they are everywhere.

They've been found in every single human organ.

And I actually think we're going to need an entire new branch of medicine or an entire new paradigm for medicine over the next 10 to 15 years when we start to understand

what these microplastics are doing to our body because the medications and the surgeries that we have today are not going to work in the face of diseases caused by microplastics

because the physiology is totally different right scary yeah so it's it's so i don't know about california in regards to that but like these are the types of questions we should be asking like if you see a state that's an outlier with autism one and 22 why aren't we asking urgently

what are all the different layers of our environment that could be leading to this precious child's brain to be developing in a way that's going to likely make their life a lot more challenging.

Right.

Why are we talking about that?

Yeah, I've never heard anyone ask that.

Yeah.

And 5% chance of having kid with autism.

That's really high.

All we talk about is how do we put more resources towards early intervention programs in schools, which is great, but it's not the root cause.

Yeah.

It's all about how do we then create more programs to support the kids and families once the diagnosis is there.

Again, no problem with that.

And yet, why is it happening?

Why aren't we, why do we spend 11 more times on cancer research at the NIH than we do on cancer prevention?

50 to 70% of cancer cases are preventable, but we spend all the money on cures, not prevention.

And the same thing, we see it with every disease.

And we're not, we're not even,

it's actually, it's almost,

it's problematic sometimes to even ask the question of how do we prevent this?

Because there are people,

you know, who believe that it's somehow shaming people to ask questions like, how can we prevent this issue, like shaming families?

And so it's a complex area to navigate.

But at the end of the day, like we're not adequately protecting children

from the environment.

And

there's all these tripwires in culture that stop people from asking questions.

Oh, you're shaming families.

Oh, you know, you're shaming neurodivergence.

When in reality, it's just people saying, why is this happening?

Why is it going up so much?

Why was that one in 150 20 years ago?

Like, what's happening?

So,

it's scary.

I grew up like middle, upper class, and I look at the school lunch and it's just complete shit.

Like, you know what I mean?

Like, so I can't even imagine like

what they're feeding kids, like, yeah, and who's controlling that.

Like, we need to be questioning that.

We do.

Yeah.

And you see, like,

I don't know if you knew this, but the National School Lunch Program, it serves 7 billion meals per year.

It's a huge program.

It is

bigger than all of the top three fast food chains in the U.S.

combined.

Whoa, I believe.

It's a massive, massive program in terms of meals served.

And like with everything, there's huge conflicts of interest going on.

The USDA determines the national school lunch program requirements.

They're generally defined by the USDA Guidelines for America, which come out every five years.

For the past five years, USDA Guidelines for America, 19 out of the 20 people on the advisory board to create that guideline had conflicts of interest with the food industry, full conflicts of interest.

And the new guidelines are coming out for 2025.

And actually, just two days ago,

there were screenshots of their advisory meeting from their Zoom meeting that came online and are going around right now, circulating, which showed that there is an emphasis in the new guidelines to downplay

the impact of food on the reversal or prevention of chronic disease.

So they want to talk less about the fact that food is related to chronic disease.

This was on a slide.

And

that could seem innocuous on its surface, but if you think about it, what would that, who would that benefit if we downplay the fact that food is medicine in the USDA guidelines?

It just continues to propagate the culture that food is not a tool that we use to prevent or reverse chronic disease, when in fact, it is the best tool that we have to prevent or reverse chronic disease.

So you just, and that this year's panel, the conflicts of interest are rampant.

Novo Nordisk,

who makes Ozempic, is directly paying several members of the people who are making our USDA food guidelines for America.

Bayer, Pfizer, Impossible Meat that makes Beyond Burger, several processed food companies, Abbott Nutrition that makes pediatric formula.

So

USDA,

conflicts of interest.

advisory board that makes our USDA Guidelines for America, conflicts of interest.

That funnels down into school lunch, national school lunch program guidelines, which feed 7 billion meals to kids per year.

It's just, you can't make this stuff up.

It's not,

the kids' health is not the number one interest in this whole program.

And, but there is an amazing organization that I really do want to shout out called Eat Real.

It's an incredible organization that's actually going in and changing school lunches at tens of thousands for tens, hundreds of thousands of students.

And any school or parent that wants their school lunches to be better in America can reach out to Eat Real and they can help them get healthier food or generative food into the schools.

Nice.

The interesting thing on the school level, the individual school level is that

they have very strict budgetary requirements for what they can put in the food.

So oftentimes these

the people who run the programs, they want what's best for the the children, but like they're just trapped by prices and things like that.

So what Eat Real does is help schools understand how within their budget to buy the healthiest food possible that kids will actually eat.

So just want, it's an incredible organization.

But I'll link it below.

That's important.

Yeah.

And, you know, you may have seen recently that Kraft Heinz formed a partnership with the USDA to put lunchables in schools.

So

oh, yeah.

Didn't they find heavy metals in lunchables?

Oh, yeah.

A year ago.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, it's not real food.

It's literally food that is based on the three worst things you can put in the human body, which is ultra-processed refined grains, ultra-processed-refined seed oils, and ultra-processed refined sugars.

And that is what they are going to be putting in school.

And their marketing was phenomenal.

I remember looking forward to eating those growing up.

Yeah.

The pizza one.

Yeah.

Oh, the, I mean, yeah.

I mean, we,

but even it was probably safer when we ate it as kids than it is now, you know, because it's also just covered in pesticides too.

But it's like, I just, my heart breaks for children today.

Like they're being born into a culture where I think it is a full-time job for parents to keep their kids safe from all the forces that are trying to profit off our children's bodies.

That's what happens.

Children are this incredible profit center for every major industry in our country, tech, food, healthcare.

You get kids addicted to the ultra-processed food, addicted to their phone, and getting chronic illness earlier in their life.

Nothing is more profitable than that cycle.

And so for parents, I think part of the reason they're so overwhelmed right now is because just to keep your kid baseline safe from the forces on every level coming for your kid for profit, you have to be a warrior.

And I think parents are exhausted.

Absolutely.

Well, it's been a really fun episode, JC.

I know you got a book that's been on the number one bestseller for 19 weeks now, right?

Yes.

New York Times bestseller list for 19 weeks and number one this week, which is so exciting.

Incredible.

So we'll link that below.

Is it on Audible as well?

Yep.

Good energy, that surprising connection between metabolism and limitless health.

I read the audiobook, so that's really fun.

Um, and it's Kindle and hardcover.

Perfect, we'll link it below.

Thanks so much for coming on.

Thank you.

Yep, thanks for watching, guys.

As always, check out the links below.

See you next time.