Dr. Mark Hyman exposes how America’s $5T healthcare system profits from ultra-processed foods—73% of grocery shelves, 67% of kids’ diets—driving obesity (40%+ in all states) and chronic diseases like diabetes and Alzheimer’s, while pharma and agribusiness lobby against reforms. He links $12B/year in SNAP-funded junk food to rising cancer rates and critiques vaccine dogma, citing corporate immunity from lawsuits and $100B profits from unnecessary vaccines. Solutions? Regenerative agriculture, banning ultra-processed foods from federal programs, and mandating nutrition in medical schools—yet systemic resistance persists, with censorship of dissent like vaccine safety debates. The core issue: a broken system prioritizing profits over prevention, where taxpayers fund both the illness and its "cure." [Automatically generated summary]
Tucker, we're in this historic moment where, you know, America's waking up to the fact that it's been the frog in boiling water, slowly getting sicker and sicker and sicker, bankrupting our country with almost $5 trillion in healthcare costs, $1 in $5 of our economy.
80% of it or more is preventable.
99% of Medicare dollars are spent on preventable chronic disease.
And never this conversation has happened in the political discourse until now.
Everybody's upset about healthcare on some level for some reason, but I haven't heard anybody until recently in the public sphere address why it's so expensive.
But I remember, you know, sitting in my office years ago, and I had a diabetic patient come in.
I realized, you know, I can't cure diabetes in my office.
It's cured on the farm and the food we grow.
It's cured in the food manufacturing process.
It's cured by what people buy in the grocery store.
It's cured in the kitchen.
And so we really have to look at the root causes of our food system and say, why are my patients eating this food?
Well, it's because of the food system.
Well, why do we have the food system we have and the way in which it's operating that drives this chronic disease epidemic, which now is the biggest killer on the planet and is caused by food.
Food has outpaced smoking as the number one killer in the world.
It has 11 million people a year.
It's the biggest killer in the United States.
Why does that happen?
It's because our...
Our policies are driven in large part by industry, by the food industry, the ag industry, chemical and seed companies.
And those are the companies that are profiting.
This is the biggest food, biggest industry in the world.
It's over $16 trillion when you aggregate all the food companies, the fast food companies, the agricultural, chemical and seed companies.
And this is enormous force that's driving our political process.
And so a lot of the policies we have either by, you know, just kind of...
Misalignment of our expectations and incentives of what happened or because of deliberate actions in the food companies have actually driven a food system that's making us sick.
And we have an illness industrial complex.
We have a system that's driving disease and everybody's profiting from it.
And no one's addressed that before.
And this is why we have the system.
We're supporting commodity crops, wheat, corn, and soy that get turned into ultra-processed food, which is basically chemical science projects that our bodies are not used to.
They're not technically defined as food.
Food is something that helps nourish a human being towards life and growth.
These things don't.
They do the opposite.
They cause disease.
And so we sort of slowly get into this system where we're...
The enormous rise in chronic diseases over the last 50 years.
You know, Tucker, when I graduated medical school, the cost for health care in America was half a trillion dollars.
Now it's almost 10 times that in my lifetime.
When I graduated from medical school, there was not a single state with an obesity rate over 15%.
Now there's not one under 30, and almost all are over 40. 42% of Americans are obese.
I grew up none, zero, affluent area, but still no fat, zero fat people.
And I always thought that it was like a failure of will.
It was a kind of sin, it was gluttony. - Yes, yes, 100%. - And then I came just from my own experience to realize that if you just go about your life as the way Americans do, just eat what's presented you, and you don't make any effort to fight it, Yeah.
The NIH did an incredible study where they took a group of people and they fed them for two weeks a whole foods diet matched for protein, fat, carbs, fiber.
Then they fed them an ultra-processed diet and they saw what happened to their biology.
The ultra-processed food, which is what 60% of our diet is, it's 67% of kids' diet, it's 73% of the food on our grocery store shelves.
When you eat that food, it dysregulates your appetite.
You eat 500 calories more a day in a week.
That's 3,500 calories.
3,500 calories equals a pound of weight gain.
In a year, that's 52 pounds.
So if Americans are eating this food, which is everywhere, which is ubiquitous, which we're marketed to death on.
I mean, kids get targeted.
$14 billion.
The food industry spends on marketing junk food to kids.
They see an average of 30,000 ads a year.
You can talk to your kid breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and snacks about healthy food, and you're not going to be marketing.
And this, to me, is criminal.
Most countries have banned this.
Most countries don't allow this.
And, for example, Chile has gotten all the food marketing to kids off between 6 in the morning and 10 at night.
They have no more Tony the Tiger on Frosted Flakes, no more Toucan on Fruit Loops.
And, you know, I've looked at the data, and even though we're spending more and more, it would be fine if we were spending $5 trillion and America was getting healthy.
It would be fine if we were spending $485 billion on drugs if they were working.
But, Tucker, the drugs that we're using for the diseases we have, Are not the right treatment.
The right treatment is changing what we're eating.
And if you look at heart disease, it's up 50%.
Cancer's up 30%, 60% higher in those under 50. So we're seeing cancer rates rising in the young in rates we've never seen before.
Well, certain cancers like lung cancer and other cancers have gone down, but when you see cancer rates increasing in children by 30%, you see autoimmune diseases up 100%, you see mental health issues up 80%, you see autism up 1,000%, ADD up 200%, diabetes up 400%, Alzheimer's up 150%.
So we are screwing up here big time by not dealing with the root cause, and we're spending on all those conditions.
Two to three hundred percent more on drugs.
So we're almost like, you know, we're increasing by one or twofold these diseases, and the drug use has gone up two or threefold, and we're losing.
So if it was working, great, but it ain't working.
And what's happening is that now, most people don't realize it, but that one of every dollars of your taxpayer dollars goes to fund our health care costs in America of that $4.9 trillion.
Which was half a trillion when I graduated medical school.
That's paid for by the taxpayer, and it's mostly preventable.
We're probably adding $2 trillion to our federal deficit every year because of this.
Also, the amount of money we're spending is 40% of all healthcare bills.
If you look at the total healthcare bill, When you add in everything the government, not just Medicare, but the Indian Health Service, the military, all federal employees, all the programs that the government is funding around health care, it's 40% of the total health care bill in America is paid for by the U.S. government.
And we have enormous power to change how those dollars are spent and how chronic disease is addressed in this country.
And for the first time, take this on and not just try to find a pill for every ill, but to get to the root cause.
And it's really from...
Changing our food system from field to fork, and it's addressing the conflicts of interest in government, it's addressing NIH funding, it's addressing what we pay for with...
You know, food stamps, there's so many areas that we have policy levers.
So the NOVA classification, and there's many different classifications for different kinds of food processing, and there's pros and cons with each one.
So there's no perfect system.
But the NOVA classification was developed by scientists in Brazil.
It's now their standard of care for their food programs and dietary guidelines.
Non-processed food is a tomato, an egg, an apple, an almond.
You know what that is, right?
But if you make almond butter, well, that's a little bit of minimally processed food.
If you make a can of tomatoes, that's minimally processed.
There's another level of processing that you use in cooking.
It's a little more sort of processing of things.
But it's not made from anything other than real food ingredients.
The fourth classification is ultra-processed.
And this is essentially where they take commodity crops, which are funded with our federal dollars.
You know, Tucker, there's a 350% higher rate of suicide in farmers than there are in the rest of the population.
There's $435 billion of farmer debt that they carry to support us.
And they're stuck between the crop insurance that the government's paying, the banks which are providing them...
You know, the loans and the agrochemical and seed companies that are providing the fertilizer, the seeds, and the chemicals that they're spraying on the farm.
So what happens is they're growing these commodity crops that the government's basically supporting them funding of wheat, corn, and soy.
But you're not eating wheat berries or whole grain.
You're not eating true whole soybeans.
You're not eating just corn on the cob.
These are deconstructed in factories, in science, basically science labs, into their molecular components are torn apart and rebuilt into these So how do
I think it's going to have a long list of ingredients.
If you eat Indian foods, they have lots of spices.
That's fine.
It's a real food.
But if it's something that is in Latin that you don't understand, can't pronounce, or it has a health claim on the label, it's probably not good for you.
I mean, like, Lay's potato chips now says they're gluten-free.
There was a large study published reviewing all the literature on food addiction.
And there's something called the Yale Food Addiction Scale, which is questions you can look at up online.
You just answer the questions.
And it tells you if you're a food addict.
Just so that you can do a questionnaire to tell if you're an alcoholic.
It's 14% of the adult population are alcoholics.
14% of people are food addicted and 12% of children are food addicted by the scientific definition of food addiction.
Not just, oh yeah, this is addictive, but actually biologically addictive, measuring the things you need to measure to determine addiction.
And so if that's true, you say compulsion, but it's really...
A hijack of our biochemistry.
So the food industry has designed foods to hijack our biology.
There's a book written by Michael Moss called Salt, Sugar, and Fat, where he interviewed 300 food industry executives and whistleblowers and scientists.
And basically they said, look, we have taste institutes where we hire craving experts.
These are their own terms.
To create the bliss point of food, which is the maximum lighting up of your brain.
And then we go for targeting.
Marketing to heavy users.
So they're not going to get me to drink a can of Coke, but they're going to get someone who's already having Coke to try to drink a two-liter bottle, right?
And they know how to do that.
And so the effects of these foods are so harmful on us, and they know what they're doing, and they actually designed them to be this way.
I mean, the tobacco companies bought a lot of the food companies back in the 70s, RJ Arnabisco, Phil Morsecraft, and they built this whole...
Industry of ultra-processed food, there's now 600,000 ultra-processed food products, 80% of them are full of sugar, and the things that are driving most of the things that are wrong with America, if you look at food, it's the nexus for everything.
One, obviously chronic disease, all the things we mentioned, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer's, autoimmune diseases, I mean, just digestive disease, all the things, depression, mental health now is linked to, ultra-processed food, there's really well-documented science on this, that these foods cause depression, anxiety.
So we have all these foods that are causing disease.
Then we have the economic burden, which we talked about, almost $5 trillion.
We have the effect on national security because 77% of military recruits are rejected because they're unfit to fight.
So we have a national security crisis.
And 72% more evacuations were for obesity compared to war injuries from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Think about that.
In a war, more soldiers were evacuated because of obesity than because of war injuries.
Academic performance.
We're 30th something in the world in math and reading.
Where kids are suffering, our kids are on ADD medications.
Makes you cognitively impaired, behavioral issues.
I mean, there was one study, Tucker, where they took kids in juvenile detention centers and they gave them healthy food, swapped it out for the junk food.
The best Christmas presents are the ones that you would give yourself.
Well, this Christmas we were recommending a gift that we do give ourselves.
Meat from Meriwether Farms in Wyoming.
So about six months ago, we'd interviewed a bunch of different health specialists, doctors, and nutritionists about food in the United States.
And the consensus is it's not very good, particularly the meat.
So we decided let's search across the country and find a source of good, clean, tasty meat.
Not all of it tastes very good.
The clean stuff, by the way.
So after trial and error, we settled on our all-time favorite, Meriwether Farms.
And we really settled on it.
So every time we have dinner with a guest before the show, which is often, we serve the exact same thing, steaks from Meriwether Farms.
And every single time, they've been excellent.
Every guest has loved them.
We eat them at home and at work.
So we can recommend this with total heartfelt sincerity.
And this year, Meriwether Farms...
Makes it very easy for you to send their meat as a gift.
They've got all kinds of gift boxes.
Their famous steaks including Wagyu beef, roasts, burgers, hot dogs, beef sticks, snacks, everything you could possibly want you can send to your loved ones from Meriwether Farms.
The address is meriwetherfarms.com slash Tucker.
Use the promo code TuckerChristmas for a discount this year.
We eat it.
We recommend it.
Merriweather.
It's M-E-R-I-W-E-T-H-E-R farms.com slash Tucker promo code TuckerChristmas at checkout.
And then, you know, we have also the effect on biodiversity because of all the chemicals we're using.
We have 75% less pollinators.
You know, pollinators, you know, it's hard to have agriculture.
We have a 50% loss in bird species from where we're growing food.
But the destruction of our waterways, because we use fertilizer that runs off into the rivers and lakes and streams and causes eutrophication, which basically grows algae because of the extra fertilizer, and then sucks all the oxygen out of the water and all the fish die.
There's dead zones the size of New Jersey and the Gulf of Mexico.
There's 400 around the planet that feed half a billion people.
So this is all from the fertilizers, which uses actually 2% of the world's global energy to make fertilizer.
But you don't need to do that if you use regenerative agriculture, which is what actually one of the things I think this new industry should focus on, which is how do you fix the farming?
Because you've got to start at the field to fix food.
He wanted to, but the problem is we're barking up the wrong tree.
If you look, there's a real clear data on two drivers of cancer.
One is food, and particularly sugar and starch.
And two is environmental toxins, carcinogens, which are ubiquitous.
We're exposed to toxins everywhere, and we can reduce those.
But the food part is really interesting because when you look at the growth of cancer cells, they feed on sugar.
There's a whole metabolic theory of cancer where if you use a ketogenic diet, and this is work being done in Columbia and by Sid Mukherjee and others, ketogenic diets as a treatment for cancer to actually...
Shut down the cancer cells because they can only feed on sugar.
We are like a hybrid engine.
We can go electric or we can go gas.
We can go carbs.
We can go fat.
Cancer only goes sugar.
So you start with sugar and you kill the cancer.
So the amount of sugar and flour eating is about 152 pounds of sugar per person per year and 133 pounds of flour.
That's a lot.
That's almost three quarters of a pound a day of sugar and flour for every American.
And what that does is it fuels the cancer cells.
And so pancreatic cancer, colon cancer, breast cancer, uterine cancer, prostate cancer, even some lung cancers.
And the data is documented go up with insulin resistance, go up with obesity, and go up with diabetes and metabolic dysfunction.
93% of Americans, Tucker, are metabolically broken.
This is extraordinary from the American Journal of Cardiology.
And what this means is that...
We're somewhere on the degree of what I call diabetes.
Diabetes is pre-diabetes to type 2 diabetes.
And we cut off at pre-diabetes, but that's, you know, one in two Americans has pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes.
That's bad enough.
38% of teenage boys.
I mean, when I graduated medical school, there was no type 2 diabetes.
There was no type 1 diabetes.
It was juvenile diabetes, which is an autoimmune disease, or adult diabetes, which is a foodborne disease.
And so now we've changed the names to protect the guilty.
The healthcare system is broken, and I believe that I could work for another 50 years, and maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe with this new administration, we'll leapfrog and things will change, which I'm very hopeful for.
But I created a company with a number of other co-founders called Function Health that allows you easy access to your own blood test.
It is simple, five minutes to sign up.
15 minutes to go into a Quest lab to get your labs drawn.
You get over 110 biomarkers or lab tests that gives you insight into everything that's going on in your body that you're not being checked for at your regular doctor's office.
You get five times more diagnostics.
You look at your hormones, your metabolic health, your cardiovascular health, your nutritional health.
I mean, your immune health, we've seen 46% of Americans have some degree of autoimmunity, which is crazy.
It's one of the biggest cost drivers.
Whether it's thyroid autoimmunity or other autoimmunity or pre-autoimmunity, we're seeing 67% have nutritional deficiencies.
And these are the lab reference ranges that are Quest.
These are not what I would think are optimal.
So vitamin D, for example, should be over 50. 45, 50. The reference range is 30. But still, we've got a huge amount of people deficient at that level.
And when you're under 30, your risk of getting sick and dying of COVID is 70% higher.
If your vitamin D is over 50, your risk of death is zero.
So we really used the technology to help us build a database of the most up-to-date scientific information informed by all the scientific literature.
And you have a clear description of what every biomarker means.
So if your insulin or blood sugar or your cholesterol particles are abnormal or you have positive autoimmune antibodies, we tell you what it means, why it happens, what the root causes are, not necessarily just what traditional medicine thinks, but what the new science thinks around root causes.
We give you all the self-care things you can do yourself to optimize your health.
So you can upgrade your biology with insights from scientific literature, from knowledge experts.
We've brought in top scientists and doctors to help inform you.
So it's like having a thousand doctors in your pocket.
Remember the iPod was a thousand songs in your pocket?
This is a thousand doctors in your pocket.
And it gives you the ability to do self-care.
And like I said, diabetes isn't cured in the doctor's office.
It's cured in the kitchen.
And that's really what most chronic diseases can be fixed.
And I see this over and over after doing it for 30 years.
I've written almost 20 books.
And what I see is when people follow the guidance without having to go to the healthcare system, they can correct these things and they can fix these things.
We've spent about $2 billion and over 400 studies trying to find drugs for Alzheimer's, and nothing has worked.
The drugs that are approved are extremely expensive, have marginal benefit, a lot of side effects, and cost a huge amount of money, and may delay your entry into a nursing home by two or three months.
That's a win.
That's not very good.
Now, there's a couple of trials that have been done.
The FINGER trial out in Europe and the POINTER trial, which is emerging, that showed aggressive lifestyle intervention, diet, exercise, managing stress, sleep, optimizing all your risk factors, was able to not just slow the progression of Alzheimer's and dementia, but to reverse it.
This is published data.
This is not my opinion.
Richard Isaacson also has published this data.
And now using biomarkers, and we can actually test with function.
Soon we'll be adding biomarkers.
For Alzheimer's.
So now there's blood tests for Alzheimer's.
So you don't have to wait until you forget your keys.
And also for cancer, you're asking about cancer, we do a multi-cancer.
You can see the changes up to 30 years before you get Alzheimer's as a symptom.
With blood tests, it's not as far as that.
We're still figuring out what those times are.
But you can see these proteins start to develop in the blood that indicate there's something happening.
And you can then intervene early.
And the thing about Alzheimer's is that if you intervene early, you can have an incredible benefit to help slow the progression and delay it and actually reverse it.
And I've seen this in my patients.
I wrote a book about this, the Ultramind solution 15 years ago.
Dale Bredesen has written a book called The End of Alzheimer's and documenting that we had to get to the root causes.
You know, I think most doctors are in a world as flat world.
They don't understand that the world is round.
We've shifted a paradigm scientifically from a disease-based diagnostic system to understanding the body as an integrated ecosystem.
And so the work of people like Leroy Hood from the Institute for Systems Biology, his Phenome Project, is mapping out how our understanding of disease is completely wrong.
It's based on labeling people according to symptoms and where it is in their body, rather than on mechanisms and causes.
So I wrote a book called Young Forever, which is about longevity.
We talked about it, I think, last time I was on your show.
And in the book, I talk about the scientists who come up with this model of what are the root causes of aging?
Because we think aging is just going to happen inevitable.
We're going to get sick.
We're going to get older.
We're going to get frail.
We're going to get weak.
And they've identified the underlying biology behind that.
So if we cured heart disease and cancer from the face of the planet, we might extend life five to seven years.
You can get the same thing with meaning and purpose or playing tennis.
But if you actually dealt with the hallmarks of aging, the things that really go wrong, inflammation, mitochondrial injury, nutrition, and your microbiome, all the things that underlie disease, you could extend life by 30 or 40 years, which means living to 120, which is a crazy notion, right?
So we now understand biology in a very different way than we did before, and it hasn't translated into the clinic.
And so why I co-founded Function Health with my co-founders was to help accelerate this gap, to kind of leapfrog over this ossified system.
Doctors graduating in the 50s or 40s, we're dealing with infectious disease and acute care medicine, and we have the best acute care medicine system in the world, bar none.
If you have an acute infection, if you have sepsis, if you need to go to ICU. You're in a car crash.
I mean, a lot of smart people you included, you're definitely one of the earliest, but are saying varieties of what you're saying now.
So, I mean, it was, you know, 30 years ago or so that the Congress hauled the heads of the tobacco companies, Reynolds and Philip Morris and Laura Lard, and humiliated them on camera.
And like, you knew you were hurting people, you did it anyway.
I mean, there are class action lawsuits that are being now...
I mean, it's kind of crazy, Tucker, when you think about it.
When the American taxpayer is paying through the nose for everything all the way along, We pay for
that.
And then we pay for...
Those foods for our SNAP program.
So we have about $125 billion in SNAP, which is our food stamp program.
It's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance.
But there's no N in there.
It's just food security, which means calories.
So when you get your EBT benefits in the beginning of the month, these food companies know to advertise in the bodega.
So they'll get your two-liter bottle of Coke with your EBT, and they put these giant ads in there, and they know exactly when they're getting their cards.
So we basically fund 75% of the food bought on SNAP. 10% is junk food.
10% is soda.
So you think about $12 billion on soda the Americans paying.
For example, WIC, which is Women, Infants, and Children's Food Program, is based on only allowing people to buy food that's going to be healthy for the mother and child.
Why not apply that to WIC? You know, why not school standards being changed so that...
You know, there's a group from the WHO has put together some initial papers and is coming out with a report next year about the commercial determinants of health, which is how multinational and transnational corporations in food and ag and...
Alcohol, tobacco are essentially driving our chronic disease epidemic and they're privatizing the profits, subverting public health and socializing the costs and the governments are the ones who are struggling with this.
I hate to say it, but I've traveled a lot of countries this year, and the best food I had in any country was in a country under such severe U.S. sanctions that no U.S. companies could operate.
I'm not going to name the country, but I don't want to be too controversial.
But to go to a country whose food is best I've ever had in my whole life, and it also happens that that country has no American food of any kind because it's not allowed, maybe there's a connection?
And, you know, government procurement, $166 billion the government spends on food for military, for correctional facility, for schools, for everything.
When you look at the fat bill, do you know how much that could change the food system if we said, based on these set of nutritional principles, which are...
I think, well accepted in the nutritional science community of being, what is food?
If we just followed that and didn't pay for all the junk food and ultra-processed food, we just took that out, it would change the food system in America because all the industry would change.
If you take $166 billion out of the food economy and say, we're only buying healthy food from farmers who produce healthy food, it's going to change everything from field to fork.
These are simple things that the government can do that's easy.
I mean, the problem is this is a very, I don't want to sound conspiratorial, but I'm telling you there is a very loose organization of industries that are working together to keep the system status quo.
They don't want changes in our agricultural subsidies.
They don't want changes in farming practices.
They don't want changes in how we fund SNAP. They don't want changes in how we reimburse healthcare.
They don't want changes in our food labeling.
They don't want changes in ingredients that are in our food.
This is stuff that's so entrenched that it's essential for their profits and their success.
I mean, prisons, if you think about it, have been used as, because it is captive, the population of a prison, they've been used as testing populations for syphilis and vaccines and LSD and all kinds of horrible shit.
And you feel so sorry for the men who had to endure that.
I think we need to do that in every sector of society where the government has a hand.
School lunches, the military, all our federal food programs.
These are easy interventions.
But the food industry blocks it by huge lobbying efforts in Washington.
You know, in my nonprofit Food Fixed Campaign, which is really about educating and advocating for policy change to really improve the health of Americans, we met with over 150 senators and congressmen on both sides of the aisle.
And everybody seems to get this issue, and they're not hearing about it, and they're starting to hear about it because people like me are talking about it, but I'm just one guy.
I have a little nonprofit.
I'm not funded by industry.
I don't have any conflicts of interest, and I'm just trying to, you know...
It's the misinformation and miseducation of our policymakers and government officials.
They come in with their briefing books, with their scientific papers, with their justification, with their regulations written, with the legislation written, and they literally give it to them.
I've been in Congress and in Senators' office and said, this is amazing, Mark.
Could you write the legislation for me?
I'm like, what?
I don't know how to do that.
I mean, I have people on my team who probably can do that.
It was sort of a startling kind of revelation that people in Congress need help, and they need guidance, they need direction.
And they're good people, and they want to do the right thing, and they're not hearing the other side of the story.
And so when you lay it out for them, they're like...
I was with Senator Boozman from Arkansas.
He's a great guy.
And he's like, yeah, I'm seeing the changes in my rural community.
I'm seeing what's happening on the farms.
I'm seeing the degradation of these.
And I'm seeing the processed food.
I'm seeing what affects my population.
And he gets it.
And he wouldn't let me.
I was off for 45 minutes.
You usually get like a senator pops in high, five minutes in and out.
But it was an incredible conversation.
I've seen this with Randy Fenstra, who's really interested in regenerative agriculture.
I've seen this on the Democratic side with people like Cory Booker and Richard Neal and James McGovern, who are trying to advocate for food policies.
So Roger Marshall and Cassidy, both doctors, fully in on this stuff.
So there's so many allies in Congress on both sides of the aisle that are sort of sick and tired of how this thing is going and realize we can't continue to do what we're doing.
And I think, Tucker, we have a historic opportunity with Trump and Bobby Kennedy and Dr. Oz now is the head of CMS and other people, I think.
And I've talked to Trump about it, and he means it.
I would say Bobby Kennedy is one of the nominees he's proudest of.
He hasn't backed down at all.
I think Bobby's going to get confirmed.
I want to ask you about the thing for which Bobby is most famous, but I don't want to say the word because YouTube will monetize this.
Even now, YouTube's biggest company, most powerful company in the world, Google, has an AI program that will literally knock out your video if you use the V-word.
So Bobby Kennedy became infamous 15 or 20 years ago when he wrote a piece in Rolling Stone suggesting that – I mean, he just got exiled from America, basically, for suggesting that the shot might cause really bad outcomes, health outcomes in children.
And to say a subject is settled and we need no more science doesn't make any sense.
Like, aspirin's a great example.
We thought aspirin was the greatest thing on the planet Earth, that everybody should get an aspirin to prevent a heart attack.
But as we start to look at the data, very carefully, we saw that, gee, no, actually, it increases the risk of certain problems like brain hemorrhage and gastrointestinal bleeding and death.
And 30,000 people die every year from taking aspirin for prevention of heart attacks.
That's why it's good for preventing heart attacks, but it also can make you have a brain hemorrhage or a gut bleed.
And so now the guidelines have been revised and it's not recommended for everybody, only certain high-risk populations, right?
And yet we change our mind based on the data.
We look at the science.
We update our data.
The V word is, you know, listen, I'm just going to say it.
I think vaccines are one of the greatest advances in medicine in history.
They have eradicated many serious diseases, polio, smallpox, you know.
I mean, I was in Haiti during the earthquake, and I was working at the hospital there, and there was a guy with tetanus, and I'd never seen a full-blown case of tetanus before.
There's some really good things we've done in medicine to reduce a lot of the childhood illnesses and childhood deaths, measles.
Vaccines aren't a problem.
The problem is that we need to study long-term safety and efficacy of these drugs like any other drug.
You know, one of the problems with medicine is that, and I think this was a huge failure during COVID, and I think Bobby was right about this, you know, we did not actually give the American public They benefited the doubt that they were smart enough to understand the nuances around this treatment.
So they said, vaccines are safe, they're effective.
Well, not really.
Like any drug, it's sort of safe and it can be effective, right?
Aspirin is effective for certain things, but it also has side effects, right?
And so vaccines work to prevent the mortality rates and reduce death rates and reduce the severity of infection, but it didn't prevent...
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Why do you think it became verboten to ask any questions about this one category of medicine?
I think, you know, as a public health effort, You know, I understand the public health mission, which is to sort of work on the health of the entire population.
And so you're willing to kind of simplify things and put out messaging that may not be completely scientific in order to get people to do stuff, right?
Which is what happened during COVID. Oh, you lie to manipulate people.
I mean, listen, when you prescribe a drug as a doctor, you're supposed to say, if I give you this drug, here's the benefits and here's the risks, you know?
It's really clear we're supposed to do that in medicine.
The food industry and the egg industry have deliberately set up a series of actions and strategies across all sectors of society to take over the narrative.
One, they fund most of the research.
So there's 12 times as much research, quote, on nutrition from food industry.
In other words, the American Beverage Association does a study on artificial sweeteners.
They find they're fine.
And they do a study on soda.
They find it doesn't cause obesity, right?
That's kind of garbage science.
And there's 8 to 50 times more likely to show a benefit for their product if they're funding it.
So they take over the research infrastructure.
They take over the professional associations.
The American Heart Association receives $192 million a year from pharma and food.
American Diabetes Association, Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, all the major professional associations, which we think are independent, giving us independent advice, are funded and co-opted by these.
And then they fund not only professional associations, not only they fund nutrition research, but they obviously also create these front groups like the American Council on Science and Health and Crop Life and all these...
We were going to show the movie Fed Up, which was about childhood obesity and how our sugar industry was causing this and our food industry was causing this.
And she said, nonviolence is just not nonviolence to others, but it's nonviolence to yourself.
And I think this is important, and I want to show this film in the King Center.
So I said, great.
And so a few days later, she called me back and said, Mark, can't do it.
I mean, in a way, I understood the thinking behind it because, you know, you want to incentivize rapid development of drugs that aren't going to be that profitable, right?
But it turns out that many of these drugs are profitable, like rotavirus, which is a new vaccine.
When we were kids, there were like eight shots.
Now there's like 72 shots you get.
And many countries, for example, don't allow, for example, hepatitis B at birth is a vaccine we're recommending in America.
It's what you get from IV drugs or sex.
Now, I don't know any newborns that are doing IV drugs or sex.
Do you have any idea why the trial bar, which has always been one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington, and definitely the most powerful in the Democratic Party, Haven't said anything about this.
But it just sort of underscores the bigger problem in our society, which is that we really have multinational and transnational corporations profiting from Creating more sickness.
Like 5%, but it's 80% of the diseases we're seeing.
They should have a mandate, for example, that all medical schools and academic institutions that receive federal funding from any source should have a nutrition curriculum and that it should be...
Mandated.
And there's a reason for that because doctors graduating today, my daughter's in medical school, she's in fourth year medical school, not a single thing on nutrition.
I'm like, what did you learn?
Well, I learned a bit of amino acids and fatty acids.
I mean, what are you going to tell your patient to have for lunch?
Yeah, I learned about, you know, quashioris core and merasmus and rickets and xerophthalmia, all these rare diseases from vitamin deficiencies in Africa and protein malnutrition.
So I think, you know, I did see some malnutrition when I was in Haiti, but it was, you know, really, really rare.
And we're not doing this.
The NIH could do a lot.
And then the HHS could fund with Medicare nutrition services in medicine, which it doesn't pay for now.
So if you have diabetes or heart disease or diet-caused diseases, it's very hard to get nutrition services.
And we at Cleveland Clinic created a lifestyle change program.
Where we got people to work together to change their behavior and change lifestyle.
It was based on this sort of work I did with Rick Warren and Saddleback Church where we got 15,000 people to lose a quarter million pounds in a year by actually getting healthy together.
So really it's about behavior change and also what to do.
So they changed what was in the refineries.
They got rid of the pancake breakfast, the ice cream socials.
They got everybody jogging for Jesus.
It was great.
And then they lost a lot of weight.
Rick lost a ton of weight.
They got healthy.
And we showed how...
People doing this in groups actually works.
And this could be funded by the federal government.
Like less than 1% get measurements for insulin, which is the single biggest thing we have a problem with in America, which is our insulin levels are spiking because of sugar.
Insulin, when it's high, causes you to store belly fat.
It makes you hungry.
It locks the fat in your fat cells and it slows your metabolism.
So you're screwed, and you get stuck in this vicious cycle where you have hungry fat that makes you eat more, that makes you want to exercise less, and you get in this cycle of weight gain.
Nobody wakes up every day and goes, I want to be diabetic.
So the amygdala is the reptile brain, fight or flight.
It's your reptilian lizard brain.
We all have one.
And we have a frontal lobe, which is the grown-up in the room.
So you've got the reptile and you've got the grown-up.
The communication there is important.
So when you're walking down the street and you see a beautiful woman, you say, gee, I'd like to kiss that woman, you don't do it because you know it's not a good idea for your marriage, right?
You have the front level going, that's probably not a good idea.
Or, gee, I like that car over there.
I want to just take that car.
And my car was stolen.
From my driveway two days ago.
It was crazy, but that's another story.
But, you know, people don't have control over their behavior because the amygdala and the frontal lobe communication is interrupted by inflammation.
Inflammation in the brain is the root cause of so many brain issues.
So depression is inflammation.
Autism is inflammation.
ADD is inflammation.
Alzheimer's is inflammation of the brain.
And Chris Palmer is a Harvard psychiatrist who wrote a book called Brain Energy talking about this and how he cured schizophrenia using a ketogenic diet getting people off of sugar.
So basically, this is something that was developed for epilepsy years ago because when no drugs work for epilepsy, neurologists realize that if they put people on a diet where their brain was just running on ketones, which is the fuel instead of sugar that the body can run on.
Maybe I said we're hybrid ACDC. The gasoline is carbs.
And the hybrid electric clean burning fuel is ketones.
So when you switch to ketones, it activates the brain's repair systems.
It improves mitochondrial function.
It reduces inflammation.
It helps cognitive function at every level.
So I've seen it work from autism to Alzheimer's to schizophrenia to depression.
Olive oil, avocados, nuts and seeds, animal fats, dairy fats.
And it basically should be a healthy version of it because you can, you know, eat bacon and that's not a good idea.
But you can do healthy ketogenic diets that actually improve health and reverse disease and work across all these things.
So sugar is really driving this big problem, sugar and starch.
And by the way, flour, bagel.
I mean, I had a...
I did a lecture the other day and a woman said, you know, I had a bagel for breakfast and I noticed I had a glucose monitor and my sugar spikes 70 points.
You know, she's got a metabolic problem.
And you can start to see when you eat these foods, your body gets dysregulated.
And when you use a diet that actually shuts off these cravings, that repairs the metabolic dysfunction, that improves insulin sensitivity, it doesn't take long.
So it's shocking.
In 5 or 10 days, we get a 70% reduction from all symptoms and all diseases by people just changing their diet.
And most people, Tucker, don't connect how they feel with what they're eating.
They don't make the connection.
And so they think they're suffering from all these problems that are related to what they're eating.
I mean, for example, if you can take out ultra-processed food and you can stop your liquid sugar calories...
If you can eat more good fats, eat good quality protein, lots of fruits and vegetables, most of our problems will go away.
This is not complicated science.
And so you don't have to be super extreme.
But if you are in an extreme situation and you have an extreme disease and you're far end of the spectrum of type 2 diabetes, yeah, you might need to do that for a while until you fix your metabolism.
Like I showed you the picture last night of that woman.
She had type 2 diabetes.
She had heart failure.
She had hypertension.
She had kidneys failing.
She had fatty liver.
She changed her diet.
In three months, she was off all her medications, off all her insulin, reversed her diabetes, reversed her heart failure, reversed her kidney failure, reversed her liver failing.
She was on her way to a heart and kidney transplant.
This is not a patient who's like just slightly broken.
She's 66 on her way out.
And in a year, she lost 116 pounds and off all her medication.
And it wasn't through rocket science or...
Or through some great new advance in medicine.
It was just through applying the basic principles of nutrition and how the system works.
Well, that's one of the things I think the new administration needs to do.
I mean, we spend over a billion dollars a day on diabetes.
And this is a completely avoidable problem.
And it's the biggest driver, again, of all these problems.
If you have diabetes, you're four times likely to get Alzheimer's, more likely to get cancer, more likely to get heart attacks.
All the things are caused by this fundamental problem of sugar and starch in your diet.
And so I think that the federal government should initiate a diabetes reversal campaign across HHS and Health and Human Services and fund these trials and demonstration projects, show this works, and then scale it up.
We did an interview with a woman called Casey Means, She's a Stanford-educated surgeon and really one of the most remarkable people I have ever met.
In the interview, she explained how the food that we eat, produced by huge food companies, big food, in conjunction with pharma, is destroying our health, making this a weak and sick country.
The levels of chronic disease are beyond belief.
What Casey means, who we've not stopped thinking about ever since, is the co-founder of a healthcare technology company called Levels.
And we are proud to announce today that we are partnering with Levels.
And by proud, I mean sincerely proud.
Levels is a really interesting company and a great product.
It gives you insight into what's going on inside your body, your metabolic health.
It helps you understand how the food that you're eating and the things that you're doing every single day are affecting your body in real time.
And you don't think about it.
You have no idea what you're putting in your mouth and you have no idea what it's doing to your body.
But over time, you feel weak and tired and spacey and over an even longer period of time, you can get really sick.
So it's worth knowing what the food you eat is doing to you.
The Levels app works with something called the Continuous Glucose Monitor, a CGM. You can get one as part of the plan, or you can bring your own.
It doesn't matter.
But the bottom line is, big tech, big pharma, and big food combine together to form an incredibly malevolent force, pumping you full of garbage on healthy food with artificial sugars.
And hurting you and hurting the entire country.
So with levels, you'll be able to see immediately what all of this is doing to you.
You get access to real-time personalized data, and it's a critical step to changing your behavior.
Those of us who like Oreos can tell you firsthand.
This isn't talking to your doctor in an annual physical, looking backwards about things you did in the past.
This is up to the second information on how your body is responding to different foods and activities, the things that give you stress, your sleep, etc., etc.
It's easy to use.
It gives you powerful, personalized health data, and you can make much better choices about how you feel.
And over time, it'll have a huge effect.
Right now, you can get an additional two free months when you go to levels.link slash Tucker.
That's levels.link slash Tucker.
This is the beginning of what we hope will be a long and happy partnership with Levels and Dr. Casey Means.
So I buy everything you're saying.
I think it's demonstrably true.
You can feel it in yourself.
And, you know, one anomaly does not disprove a general truth.
And I think with the understanding that now we're in this crisis, that he's so well articulated, and people like Casey and Callie on your podcast have done, that I've done for decades, that somehow it's getting through.
That this was never an issue.
This was never an issue in any...
I've been crying from rooftops for 30 years.
I felt like I've been this voice crying in the wilderness.
And I see that there's an awakening in America, that people are sick and tired of being sick and tired.
They're seeing everybody in their family sick.
They're seeing the rise of all the diseases.
They know something's broken.
They know the drugs and the current system is not fixing it the way it is.
It needs to be fixed.
And we need somebody to lead this.
And I think, you know, Bobby has his issues and his controversies and his questions.
But at the very heart, I think he's focused on the right thing, which is focusing on the root causes of our chronic disease epidemic, focusing on the problems of our food system, with our ag system.
And that is the right thing to be doing.
And I think the federal government has enormous power to actually change this through a whole series of different actions across different agencies that all can work together to make a difference.
And I'm thinking this is now going to happen.
I think we can provide for these things across all the agencies.
They're not like hard things, right?
We can improve SNAP. We can improve school lunches.
We can improve our dietary guidelines and fund those.
And we have dietary guidelines for Americans.
There's no funding for them.
The Congress mandates that they are produced every five years.
I met with the guidelines people in HHS. I said, we have to go around with a tin cup to the other departments to beg for Nichols to actually fund our work because we don't get any federal funding to create the dietary guidelines.
Nor does NASA, the National Academy of Science, Medicine, and Engineering.
Which is supposed to review the literature and be an independent scientific body looking at the nutritional research, doesn't have the funding to do basic literature reviews and science reviews to actually inform the dietary guidelines.
So there's no money in the process.
And then there's no money to implement the guidelines to actually create awareness and implementation across America for what we should be eating.
So the whole system is sort of broken, and we need to sort of rejigger that.
We can find, I don't know how many billions of dollars we spent on, you know, forever wars.
We're talking about a few million dollars.
A few millions of dollars could make a profound difference in actually getting the right things done.
So we have the ability to change what's happening in the DOD as well, with the military readiness and performance and performance enhancement.
I've been working with special ops forces on some of this stuff.
And the military is starting to understand that this is an issue and shift some of their policies.
You know, the NIH needs to fund, again, nutrition research.
We should probably have a National Institute of Nutrition like many other countries have.
We shouldn't allow funding for medical schools that don't actually provide nutrition curriculums.
We should, you know, have our agricultural system supporting farmers to transition to regenerative agriculture and produce healthier food and revitalize its communities.
Stop their extreme decline into sort of financial ruin and suicide.
I mean, why is there a 350% higher risk of suicide in farmers?
You know, that's ridiculous.
And that's because of our policies and what we're doing and how they're squeezed.
So we have, across all the agencies, such tremendous power to make simple changes that can really transform America.
Front-of-package labeling.
We can do front-of-package labeling, inform people about what's in their food like they have in other countries.
You know, get out the stuff.
And the European Union has really clearly identified the most harmful chemicals in our food.
Get them out of our food.
You go to Europe or you go to Canada, you don't see the same product with the same ingredients, like Fruit Loops.
You know, there's a big 400,000-person petition against Fruit Loops because their U.S. product was full of all kinds of dyes and colors, whereas in Canada, they use, you know, there's carrot dye or use, you know, blueberry dye or other things to make it colorful, not harmful dyes that are banned in other countries.
So these companies already do it.
Why shouldn't they do it in America?
If you get Kraft macaroni and cheese in America, it's got dyes in it that they don't allow in Europe.
So, we need to just enforce these standards and we should adopt the precautionary principle.
You know, we shouldn't allow things in our food that we don't know are healthy or that we don't know are good for you.
If they're harmful...
We should know about it.
So the study should be done to prove that they're safe and effective rather than just approving them and then waiting and seeing if they're harmful and then taking them off the market, which is kind of what we do.
It's different than the precautionary principle, which is, you know, you're guilty until proven innocent.
Here, you're innocent until proven guilty, which is fine in the court of law for a human being, but not for a food additive or chemical that could harm human health.
So basically, we don't have a hell of a lot of tools.
And if you take away a doctor's prescription pad, how do they practice medicine?
But I almost never pull out my prescription pad.
I don't need to.
Because lifestyle and food are the best drugs on the planet.
They're not like drugs.
They work better than any other drugs, like exercise, diet, sleep.
These are profoundly foundational to our health.
And we have a disease.
We don't have a medical system that's based on the science of creating health.
We have a system that's based on the science of diagnosing and treating diseases rather than looking at their root causes.
So part of the problem is in education.
And I think doctors want to do the right thing, and they're frustrated.
And I can tell you by being on the inside, because I'm in the clinic for 10 years, people come out of the woodwork.
They're like, this is great.
We want to change.
We need to understand how to do things differently.
Toby Cosgrove, who is the most visionary CEO in medicine, he was asked by.
You know, the Biden administration, the Trump administration, everybody to work for him.
Like, everybody wants him.
And he brought Cleveland Clinic to be, you know, the number two center of healthcare in the world.
Mayo Clinic, you know, at him, we were in competition.
He said, Mayo was what you put on your sandwich.
It was very funny.
But I met him at the World Economic Forum, and I said, Toby, what if I could empty out half your hospitals and cut your angioplasties and bypasses in half?
And they're the number one hard hospital in the world.
He said, that would be a great idea.
I said, why?
You're going to cut your revenue in half.
What are you going to do about that?
He said, we'll figure it out.
It's the right thing to do.
So he invited me to come, and I didn't want to go to Cleveland, and he had a good life.
He says, I want you to come and give you whatever you want, but let's do this.
We need to address chronic disease differently.
The way we're doing it is wrong.
We need to think differently.
And he gave me carte blanche, and we built a center.
We had done tons of research, and we showed that the model works.
And it really gets...
You know, gets into the root of the problem.
And so there is a shift in medicine.
There are doctors who are flocking to this.
There are people who are understanding the system is broken.
But it's a tough sell for some people because they're so brainwashed.
It's like if the earth is flat, you convince the earth is flat.
And you can't convince people otherwise.
And, you know, we're still arguing over things like evolution, you know, 150 years later.
I mean, we're still arguing over the earth is flat.
There's people who are flat earthers, you know?
So, this is the problem in medicine.
There's a scientific paradigm change that needs to happen.
And doctors are starting to get that this is true.
And I think it's not that they're trying to do something harmful or bad.
They're just stuck in a system.
And they need to get liberated.
And I met with Kathleen Sebelius when I was going around trying to get these policies in Obamacare around lifestyle change.
She said, this is a great idea.
You know, if we create these lifestyle change programs for Medicare, people are going to get better, they're healthier, we're going to reduce healthcare costs.
And healthcare outcomes.
She said, but who's going to know how to do it?
I said, don't worry about that.
Because if you pay for it, people will figure it out.
If you pay for an angioplasty, doctors are going to learn how to do angioplasties, right?
You don't have to worry about that.
If you pay for a lifestyle intensive change program that works better than...
I mean, this woman I was telling you about, she had $20,000 of copay.
I don't know what her other medications cost for the insurance or the healthcare system.
Plus, she was in and out of the hospital all the time.
Should we probably save the healthcare system a million bucks?
I got paid $200 a visit.
We don't get the benefit as doctors for doing the right thing.
We get benefit for doing the wrong thing.
We get benefit for doing more, not doing the right thing.
So it's a reimbursement-based system based on fee-for-service and throughput, not based on outcomes.
Imagine if you were making cars, and you had a car company that produced cars that didn't work.
Or that you drove off the lot and they just fell apart after a few years.
Or they had to come back constantly to get fixed every month.
I don't know if it's Sarah Lee or who, but it's, you know, I mean, 40% of the budget of the American Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics is paid for by the food industry.
And they have panels where you've got people from McDonald's and Coca-Cola on the panels.
I mean, I think, you know, I think for sure those are nutritious.
I think doctors...
Are stuck because they want to do the right thing.
They don't have the education of what to do.
They don't know how to do it.
And they're only told one thing, which is these drugs work for these problems and give these prescriptions.
And like I said at the beginning, we've seen dramatic rises in all chronic diseases and an even more dramatic rise in the use of prescription medications for those diseases, which we're not getting better.
We're 48 to life expectancy.
We spend more than double any other nation.
On Joe Rogan, I gave a slide to a friend of mine, Callie, and he gave it to Trump.
He gave it to somebody else to give it to Trump.
That he used Andrew Rogan, which showed the life expectancy in America and the cost of our healthcare expenditures were completely kind of off the chart.
I think we're in a moment where the country is ready for change, where the country understands we have this health crisis where they're willing to sort of make changes.
And I think if the politicians in Congress understand these issues, I think they'll make the right choices.
So it turns out that YouTube is suppressing our show.
I know.
Shocking that in an election year, with everything at stake, Google would be putting its thumb on the scale and preventing you from hearing anything that the people in charge don't want you to hear.
But it turns out it's happening.
So what can you do about it?
Well, we could whine about it.
That's a waste of time.
We're not in charge of Google.
Or we could find a way around it, a way that you could actually get information that's true.