How the government, particularly the IRS, looks at exercise and diet versus weight loss drugs and other pharmaceuticals is discussed in this episode with Calley Means and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Here is part of an official statement from the Internal Revenue Service website:
WASHINGTON — Amid concerns about people being misled, the Internal Revenue Service recently reminded taxpayers and heath spending plan administrators that personal expenses for general health and wellness are not considered medical expenses under the tax law.
This means personal expenses are not deductible or reimbursable under health flexible spending arrangements, health savings accounts, health reimbursement arrangements or medical savings accounts FSAs, HSAs, HRAs, and MSAs.
This reminder is important because some companies are misrepresenting the circumstances under which food and wellness expenses can be paid or reimbursed under FSAs and other health spending plans.
Some companies mistakenly claim that notes from doctors based merely on self-reported health information can convert non-medical food, wellness and exercise expenses into medical expenses, but this documentation actually doesn’t. Such a note would not establish that an otherwise personal expense satisfies the requirement that it be related to a targeted diagnosis-specific activity or treatment; these types of personal expenses do not qualify as medical expenses.
Full statement: https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-alert-beware-of-companies-misrepresenting-nutrition-wellness-and-general-health-expenses-as-medical-care-for-fsas-hsas-hras-and-msas
Kelly is an advocate for changing the incentives of the healthcare system, and he's the founder of TruMed, a company that enables tax-free spending on food and exercise.
He's also a co-author with his sister, Dr.
Casey Means, of Good Energy, The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health.
Which is coming out next year and available for pre-order.
Earlier in his career, he was a consultant for food and pharmaceutical industries and is now exposing the corrupt practices that those industries use to weaponize our regulatory agencies, our press, our other institutions of trust.
And he's a graduate of Stanford and Harvard Business School.
Callie, I'm really, really happy to meet you.
I'm embarrassed to say I had not heard of you before I saw you on the Tucker Carlson show.
I was blown away by some of the stuff that you were saying or working on and how aligned it is with With the things that I've been doing over the past 20 years in exposing the food industry and the pharmaceutical industry.
And anyway, I'm really proud to have you on the show.
Put soldier in your fight, Robert, and it's great to be here.
So this week, the IRS has considered by the time this podcast airs, the IRS presumably will have approved the A new policy that favors treatments with Ozempic over actually eating good food, which is the root of all of these chronic diseases that we have.
So talk to us a little bit about that.
Robert, so many Americans have come to, I think, again, be foot soldiers in your fight through different routes.
Mine was my mother.
My mom was on the chronic disease treadmill.
For 40 years, it was one pill after the next.
High cholesterol, oh, no problem, here's a statin.
High blood sugar, no problem, here's metformin.
High blood pressure, ACE inhibitor.
Every single time this is a drug deficiency, no problem, just take the pill.
Three years ago, she's hiking in Northern California, gets a pain in her stomach, goes in, gets a scan at stage four pancreatic cancer.
She's dead 13 days later.
And the reason I'm in this fight is because if one of those doctors, instead of prescribing her another pill, said, I'm going to write you a note with a detailed dietary plan.
I'm going to write you a note with an exercise intervention.
We're going to get control of this metabolic dysfunction that these indicators are representing.
This is not a statin deficiency or metformin deficiency.
There's clear metabolic dysfunction.
Robert, this is the majority of Americans.
94% of Americans are metabolically dysfunctional.
The fight I'm in is steering medical dollars.
This is actually taking what you're saying and actually how do we operationalize that?
Well, with HSA, FSA accounts, these tax-free accounts, $150 billion that Americans have to make qualified medical expenses with their physicians, those can go to drugs.
But the IRS for the past 40 years has been clear.
If the doctor writes a note for exercise, for dietary intervention, for supplements to reverse or prevent conditions, those tax-free funds can go to that.
And through my company and nonprofit, we've been evangelizing that.
What's that?
They cannot go to that.
No, no, no, no.
It can.
The IRS has been clear for 40 years that actually if a doctor specifically recommends food, exercise, supplements, it actually can.
The American people didn't understand this, and I have been evangelizing this, that when we have an obesity crisis, 80% of Americans that are overweight or obese, 66% of Americans pre-diabetic.
Doctors can and should actually be writing medical notes.
And through our work, through my nonprofit and my company, we've been evangelizing this.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans have been going to their doctor and working on dietary plans and actually steering tax-free dollars to that.
About $100 million by our account in the past couple of months.
The IRS today is literally saying...
Before we talk about the IRS, how do Americans take advantage of that?
How do you get the tax deduction?
Yeah, so there's no definition, Robert, in any laws, despite pharma's best efforts, that medicine is a pill developed by Pfizer.
Medicine is what a doctor and a patient determine what can prevent or reverse a condition.
And there's significant case law since the 1950s that if food is medically recommended, if supplementation, for instance, omega-3s, DHA, 1,000 milligrams has been shown to be more effective than an SSRI in reversing depression.
So if you tie a supplement intervention, vitamin D deficiency to many metabolic disorders, or if you can tie exercise, which exercise, as Mark Hyman has said, is if you put an epilabetic, a blockbuster, you can actually, the doctors actually can work with patients and write down an intervention.
And with that doctor's note, you can then use your medically advantaged dollars instead of waiting to get sick and buying drugs, which those funds are often used for it.
You can actually buy your gym membership.
You can actually buy supplemental food.
You can buy supplements.
Again, if you work with your doctor, my sister, my best friend, Stanford Medical School.
And you could talk to your gym membership.
The IRS has been explicit about this.
If medically recommended, they've said explicitly, and this is deep in their documents, IRS Publication 502, that you can use HSAFSA funds for your gym membership if a doctor can substantiate that exercise can help prevent or reverse a condition.
So this is...
You don't know about it.
Nobody knows about this.
We've been evangelizing this.
There's nothing up until today...
That said, medicine is a synthetic pill or injection.
As we both know, food and exercise is medicine.
And what I'm in this fight for is today, 95% of, as we know, medical interventions are after someone gets sick.
They're pharmaceutical and other sick care procedures to manage chronic disease.
There is a tool right now that we've been evangelizing very clearly that with an obesity crisis, doctors can write recommendations for exercise and food interventions instead of Ozempic.
So that brings us up to today, but that's been something I want everyone to know.
We'll talk about the IRS guidance, but the guiding principle, the guidance that is still the law is that you can go to your doctor.
If you're pre-diabetic, if you're dealing with heart issues, if you're dealing with obesity, you can actually get a medical letter from your doctor with a detailed dietary plan if Our company, TruMed, works on that too.
And you can use your HSA, FSA dollars to go to metabolically healthy items instead of getting on a pharmaceutical path like my mom, where it's just pill after pill after pill, not addressing the root cause.
Yes, that's what we've been evangelizing, Robert.
But the IRS, we can talk about that, but they had something to say about it.
Let's talk about what they said about it.
Well, just to give some inside baseball, a literal pharmaceutical lobbyist who was upset with what we were doing tipped off the IRS, and the IRS called the Washington Post.
And this will be out by the time this podcast is out.
And they said, quote, food is not medicine.
They said that in very rare cases that food and supplements can be appropriate medicine.
This is absolutely a negligent comment.
This is under context where, as I said, 80% of Americans are obese or overweight, where Ozympic is on track to be the most prescribed drug in America, where 40 plus percent of men over 40 are statin, where 25% of women are on SSRI.
The IRS, for the first time I can find in its history, says food is not medicine.
So they're commenting on what a doctor can and should recommend to their patient for the reversal of our chronic disease crisis.
And they actually, shockingly, Robert, they commented on the scale of the recommendations.
They actually said supplementation, vitamin D, omega-3s, etc., things we're very deficient in, can only be made medically in, quote, rare cases.
So let's be just really clear what the IRS is saying.
They're saying that it is easier and clearer and less scrutiny if you're obese to get a prescription for a Zempic than to work with your doctor to get a detailed food supplement exercise plan and use your own money, your tax advantage money with a doctor recommendation, with a doctor's plan. your tax advantage money with a doctor recommendation, with a Use that money, as has been elucidated over decades of case law, use that money for root cause interventions.
decades of case law, use that money for root cause interventions.
And I want to be really clear here, the operationalizing of your policies to me is the money.
The American people are not trying to be sicker, fatter, more depressed, more infertile.
As I saw working for food and pharma, we're pushing people into that system.
We're pushing trillions of dollars of incentives for kids to eat poisonous food, eventually get sick, and then get on a pharmaceutical treadmill.
Where the rubber hits the road, what's disruptive is steering medical dollars to actually helping people be healthy, exercise, food, supplements.
There was that road in the HSA, FSA policies.
And the second that starts getting attention, through my work on Tucker and evangelizing that you can actually use your medical dollars for root cause metabolic items, the IRS is not speaking about the overprescription of Ozempic or Stans or SSRIs.
They have made a statement today, quote, food is not medicine.
Do you think they did that in reaction to your interviews?
They told the Washington Post specifically, they've actually, I've heard that they said, quote, that when a benefit gets out, it's hard to take back in.
And they were complaining that all these folks are reimbursing gym memberships.
And it's just an explosion of people getting medical dollars for exercise.
They said it's happening way too fast.
Now, the fact that people hear about this, they can work with their doctor for an exercise prescription and more people are doing it is not a statement on us.
It's a statement on the broken system.
It's a statement, frankly, on the moral failure of doctors who have 66% of adults and 33% of teens coming into their office with pre-diabetes and they're prescribing pills instead of writing a note for exercise, instead of writing a note for better food interventions, instead of writing a note for supplementation.
The IRS has said explicitly this is happening way too fast.
Too many people are getting doctor's notes for food.
Too many people are getting doctor's notes for exercise.
It recently came out, I saw on Twitter, and in a very short period of time, SSRI prescriptions have doubled.
Stands are off the charts.
Adderall, 15% of US high schoolers are on.
There's no statement about the IRS. This is all being driven through tax-advantaged spending.
Billions and billions and billions of dollars of HSA, FSA dollars are going to that without a thought.
The first time the IRS, in recorded history that I could find, is commenting on the degree to which doctors should be recommending to their patients is today on food and exercise.
It's so crazy.
I mean, one of the things that you said that I've used again and again, so I didn't know this data point that, for example, when I was a kid, that typical pediatrician might see one juvenile diabetes in his career.
And today, 33% of the kids who walk into his office, one out of every three is pre-diabetic or diabetic.
That is stunning.
And that we're spending more on diabetes today than the defense budget.
That's right.
And nobody's asking why this is happening.
There's no political debate.
It's not part of the debates, the Republican debates.
Of course, we don't have Democratic debates.
Nobody is asking this question.
Why are kids so sick?
Why are we the sickest nation in the history of the world from chronic disease?
Well, let's get into it because I worked for these industries and I got an answer for you.
And again, I've been learning a lot from you, so excuse me if I'm repeating some of the stuff you've been evangelizing better than anyone, but I'll tell you from my perspective, it is happening for a very simple reason, that the largest and fastest industry in the United States, the healthcare industry, again, largest and fastest growing, it's hard to wrap your head around.
Every lever of that industry makes more money when kids are sicker and loses money when they learn metabolically healthy habits.
The insurance industry, through the 15% medical loss ratio, they can only take their 15%.
They have an incentive for costs to go up because they can raise premiums to get their 15%.
So they actually want people to be sicker.
Hospitals make money on interventions.
Pharma has created the greatest- I was trying to figure this out at one point because I was trying to meet with insurance executives and say, look, I can show you that these particular medical interventions, certain of the vaccines were actually causing higher costs in the long run.
And that the insurance companies were incentivizing people to take them.
And I went to them with data and an insurance executive said to me, listen, the truth, because I thought naively that And insurance companies would make more money if their clients were healthier.
They'd have to pay less costs.
And I thought, this is the one industry that could save us from pharma.
Because pharma, of course, obviously wants us all sick.
The regulatory agencies want us all sick.
Because they get more powerful.
But you'd think the insurance industry would counterbalance that.
Because they have to pay more money when people get sick.
And this insurance executive said to me, He said, listen, we get richer the sicker people are.
And I said, how is that possible?
And he said, well, if you're Lloyds of London and you insure against shipwrecks, is it better for you if there's one shipwreck a year or is it better for you if there's 500 shipwrecks a year?
And I said, one.
He said, no, it's 500.
Because they're making money on the premiums and on the friction.
And the more catastrophes there are, the more paid in premiums into that system.
And that's where they make their money.
So it's actually better for the insurance industry that all of our kids are sick.
And that's one of the, you know, contributors.
100%.
I think even public health experts, as we both talk to, still don't understand that fundamental incentive.
You know, still I hear very smart people from Harvard with a Harvard degree saying, oh, insurance, they'll be an ally.
No, they're not an ally.
So I really, when I say every institution, I literally mean every.
Well, go through all the institutions.
Well, well...
Insurance companies, hospitals make more money on interventions.
They make more money when kids are chronically ill coming in again and again and again for interventions, eventually leading like my mom and the majority of other Americans to something seriously life-threatening.
Pharmaceutical companies have created the greatest profit-maximizing engine in human history, which is chronic disease.
Chronic diseases, as you point out regularly, are just a beautiful invention economically because the person stays sick for their lives.
They don't die, but they live a much more tortured, much more depressed, much more infertile life, racking up many comorbidities.
When a mom at 70 years old was on five medications before a cancer diagnosis, her primary care provider said she was healthy.
She was on five medications less than the average 70-year-old, and she was actually complimented by her doctor.
So this idea, right, it's beautiful that you just rack up the chronic conditions.
And unfortunately, the dynamic, and this is not emotional.
This is not conspiratorial.
This is just a plain statement of economic fact.
The best possible thing economically for the pharmaceutical industry is for a kid to get metabolically unhealthy and get metabolically unhealthy early.
Because then you've got them, you know, they're popping out statins like crazy now in high schools.
They're popping out SSRIs like crazy.
They're popping out Adderall like crazy.
Now, of course, the American Academy of Pediatrics, we can get more into this, but the American Academy of Pediatrics is aggressively saying that Ozipic needs to be the frontline defense for 12-year-olds, that not after dietary...
That is a criminal organization, the American Academy of Pediatrics, because doctors actually believe them, so they're extremely dangerous, and the doctors don't know that they just work for the pharmaceutical companies, and they work for the food industry.
Explain how that works.
Well, I'll take it to when I was an early in my career consultant for the food and pharma industry.
The American Academy of Pediatrics actually did partnerships with Coke.
You wouldn't even believe this, but the American Diabetes Association took millions of dollars from Coke.
I helped funnel it.
Diabetes, which is literally caused by the weapon of mass destruction for blood sugar issues, liquid sugar.
They didn't denounce Coke.
They took money from them.
So these groups are going to play pharma subsidiaries.
That'd be fine, I guess, but the problem is they have statutory authority in the United States, quasi-governmental authority to make the standard of care.
So if you're a doctor and you go against the recommendation of the American Academy of Pediatrics, you could lose your license.
If you go against the guidance of the American Diabetes Association, you could lose your license.
As Robert Lustig, a former hormone disorder leader at UCSF, has pointed out, the American Diabetes Association until 2018 did not have dietary recommendations whatsoever for diabetics as long as they took their medications.
They said you can continue eating as much sugar as you want as long as you took your medications up until 2018 when they were ashamed to adjust that slightly.
So these groups fundamentally are organisms of pharma, which are fundamentally incentivized for more people to get diabetes, for more people to get heart disease, for more people to become obese, for more kids to be sick.
That's just a raw statement of economic fact.
And the thing we need to unwind, and I know you're going to unwind, is these groups cannot be trusted to create the standard of care.
That is why, right, the first-line defense for chronic conditions for kids is a prescription pad.
It's not getting that kid on a—or incentivizing— Or using the $4.5 trillion we spend on healthcare to actually incentivize that kid to exercise, to fix our broken food system that's jamming poison down that kid's throat and destroying their microbiome and leading an average kid to have a 65% of their diet ultra-processed food.
The American Academy of Pediatrics is not speaking out about that.
They're not speaking out about the rise of ultra-processed food and, frankly, the poisoning, and I would actually call it genocide of our younger generation.
They're not...
Denouncing Coke, when I worked for Coke 12 years ago to rig the food stamp program to make Coke the number one item bought on food stamps, SNAP, the program the 15% of lower income Americans depend on.
There was not a word from the American Academy of Pediatrics on that.
But now, because their main funder, or one of them, Is Novo Nordics, the most valuable company in Europe, a Danish company that is the maker of Ozempic, the weight loss cure, because they funded the American Academy of Pediatrics, they've now said again, and I can't stress this enough, the first line defense, a weekly injection for life.
You are not supposed to go off of Ozempic.
They are signing up.
50% of 12-year-olds are overweight or obese.
Right near that number.
They are jamming them into an injection for the rest of their life.
An injection that was approved based on a 68-week study that did not take into account muscle mass, which is getting depleted by this drug.
A study where the panel that approved it at the FDA was paid by Novo Nordic itself.
A study that with pharma as the top funder of news ads has been unquestioned on the mainstream news.
This is what I helped do and this is what's happening.
Pharma and the health care industry is the top funder of politicians, the top funder of the media, the top funder of med schools, the top funder of research, the top funder of civil rights groups, the top funder of every single group that we trust.
Pharma funds and that that was my big takeaway from working with them and what I'm trying to unwind.
And frankly, as you know, these groups just hide in complexity.
They hide in the cocktail parties with their IRS friends.
And there's just ways and all these levers to what leaves the IRS saying food isn't medicine.
You've got to use Ozipic.
Well, talk about NAACP and Oprah Winfrey because you talked about genocide.
During COVID, black Americans were the highest demographic in the world of people who died from COVID. And blacks in Africa were dying at one-tenth to one-two-hundredth the level of American blacks.
Blacks in Haiti, one-two-hundredth the level of American blacks.
Because although they're starving, they don't have chronic disease.
But today, you know, Black Americans suffer more from diabetes, more from cardiac illnesses, more from obesity and chronic disease than any other demographic because so many Blacks are living in food deserts and they can't afford to go to Whole Foods.
As you pointed out, poor Americans live 15 years less than Shorter lives than rich Americans.
We're literally poisoning them to death and giving them these miserable, tortured lives of being devastated by chronic disease.
And because of that, they had the highest death rate from COVID because people who died from COVID, according to CDC, The Americans who died from COVID had an average of 3.8 chronic disease.
That's why we have the highest, one of the reasons we have the highest COVID death rate on earth of any country.
We had 16% of COVID deaths.
We only had 4.2% of the globe's population.
Oh, and it's because we're the sickest people in the world.
Nobody's talking about this, but talk about, and Blacks, Black Americans were the highest, and then Hispanics.
Devastated by it because they're eating the crap food.
They're eating the potato chips and drinking the gallon, the liter five bottles, and they're being force-fetted on food stamps.
I think 10% of food stamps go to buying sugar drinks.
That's right.
So talk about the role of the NAACP and Oprah Winfrey, who has tried to get us all healthy at one point.
So sitting in the room with farm and food companies, these are not very impressive people, and it's not that difficult to rig the political hot topics that animate both the left and the right.
And time and time again, social justice issues and hot button issues on the left and the right are weaponized.
To keep us sick, to keep us addicted, to keep us in fear is rig our dopamine, which is very profitable.
So we at the food companies rigged an idea on the left and literally went into the NAACP, paid them millions of dollars.
The American Beverage Association and soda companies paid the NAACP about 11 years ago, millions of dollars.
And we said, you know, they're taking away a Coke from poor kids.
They're going to, you know, there's a bipartisan effort to not have our Low-income nutrition program, subsidized sugar water.
That's crazy.
And the NAACP and all their allies went out and said it was racist.
It was racist to take away coke from kids.
And this idea that happens time and time again, happens often to you, happens to anyone who sticks their neck out.
These PR executives in D.C. figure out how to call you racist, call you sexist.
That was just very, very calculated.
And what's clear here and what's that led to, right?
It's just led to the food deserts.
Coke lobbies to keep food stamps spending low.
And because they lobby to have what is 75% of food stamps go to ultra-processed food.
And then they hired thousands of scientists from the tobacco companies and literally rigged this ultra-processed food to be addictive.
Literally food companies are one of the greatest employers of scientists in the world.
We have the smartest minds in science working to make that ultra-processed food addictive.
That's why ultra-processed food, one reason it's so terrible, is because these are science experiments to hijack our evolution, to hijack metabolism.
So we've slotted lower income people into where that's all they can afford, where they get addicted to it.
And we effectively have an addiction crisis at the lower income and higher income levels.
We are exhibiting all the signs of this, I believe, societal addiction and denial with the fact that we've gotten addicted to these drugs.
Again, it's just weaponizing the core items.
I would just say real quick, once we've weaponized on the left, we go to the right.
So we go to think tanks on the right and we say taking away coke is nanny state.
So the groups in the think tanks that are pay to play on the right are saying that it's a nanny state operation to overregulate and take away the coke.
What's being lost in debate is it's not the free market when the system's been rigged.
It's not the free market when the pharma industry pays five times more than the oil industry on lobbying and rigging the system, and then pay think tanks on the right to say it's over-regulation to even ask a question about that.
So you've got just the hot topics on the left and the right being strategically pulled with money.
And then you just have massive amounts- On the right, they're going to the Heritage Foundation.
That's right.
Yeah.
And then the American Council for Science and Health.
I think that was one of the industries that over the years that I've ended up litigating against a lot.
And then, you know, and then Harvard University, the medical school has been hijacked by the food industry.
My sister, who's my hero, who was top of her class, Stanford Med School, head and neck surgeon.
She quit 11 years after training when she was doing her third sinusitis surgery of the day and didn't know why the patient below her had so much inflammation that they had to get surgery.
She did not learn in 11 years at Stanford Med School what causes inflammation.
She only learned how to cut it out and she put down her scalpel and has become an advocate too.
But when she traced the money, 50% of Stanford med school's funding somehow touches pharma.
At Stanford med school, 90% of my sister's classes focused on pharmacology, not a single class on nutrition.
Doctors are trained at Stanford, Casey says, from the first day of medical school.
They are told that the American patients are lazy, that they're going to be addicted to their ultra-processed food, that they don't want to exercise.
They're basically inoculated with this idea that their only job is to stand ready with the scalp and the prescription pad when these lazy American patients come to them, and it's inevitable that people are going to get sicker and sicker.
That's shameful.
That's shameful.
This has only happened, as you said, it's happened uniquely in America, and it's only happened in the past 50 years.
The differences, as you alluded to, between what's happening in America and other countries, it's not marginal.
The childhood obesity rate in Japan is 3%.
It's well over 20% here.
In overweight or obese, it's close to 50%.
As you said, COVID was a foodborne illness.
COVID preyed on our immune system.
If you were metabolically healthy, you had almost a 0% chance of dying of COVID. But you and Joe Rogan and others who got on our microphone and said maybe we should be exercising, maybe we should be eating healthy, leaked emails from the NIH say that you guys are enemy number one for saying that.
Why is that such a disruptive message?
Why is it a disruptive message that nine of the ten killers of Americans...
Are fundamentally metabolic conditions that are entirely preventable and almost entirely reversible with food and exercise?
Why do we have a world where it's anti-science when that's the case, which I don't think any doctor would even disagree with when pushed, that the only scientific intervention is a shot in this chronic disease because it's profitable?
And that's just the point I'm really trying to make.
There is a world where, and Europe does this, quite frankly, a lot more.
If you're diabetic, In Europe, you actually get a subsidized keto diet.
We can do that here.
People don't want to be sick.
My mom wanted to meet her grandchildren.
Fathers who are chronically getting heart disease want to walk their daughter down the aisle.
Americans don't want this, but that's trained to doctors, this cynicism about the American patient, which is, again, very convenient for the system.
I read that there's something like 1,600 food chemicals in our foods that are banned in Europe and Japan and other countries.
That's right.
Recently, the CEO of Kellogg said that it's a great thing for the country and his company that Americans struggle with inflation are now eating cereal for dinner.
Kellogg's is running a national ad on children's television where a family is sitting around a table about to have chicken, and Tony the Tiger and Toucan Sam pop out of the closet and say, give that chicken a rest.
Let's have Froot Loops for dinner tonight, and everyone celebrates.
Fruit Loops have neurotoxins that Kellogg in Europe has actually admitted are neurotoxins that they do not include in any other country that are being marketed to kids and in the most popular cereals today.
It's being pushed by...
And not only Kellogg itself...
I've been drawing a lot of attention.
Joe Hogan tweeted a year ago something I did on this and the NIH and Tufts got really mad.
But the NIH came out with guidance saying that dozens of cereals were recommended and that Lucky Charms were healthier than pasture-raised beef and that Honey Nut Cheerios were healthier than eggs.
Again, going to...
Why that happens in working for the food companies, you said it.
Harvard, Tufts, these elite academic institutions, they are nothing more than public relations entities, I believe, particularly when it comes to pharma research and for nutrition research.
The food industries pay these schools.
They also get grants to the NIH. They can put the NIH seal on.
They say Lucky Charms were healthier than eggs.
And then those studies are taken to Congress to confuse the issue on nutrition guidelines, and they're taken to school boards to say that you can just stock the cereal with the neurotoxins in it instead of eggs.
So that's how it all ties.
Weaponizing institutions of trust, using that to impact public policy, using that to impact funds.
We did an analysis that showed that I'm most alarmed by pediatricians because, you know, I grew up with 11 siblings.
I had something like 70 first cousins on both sides of my family.
And, you know, I never saw chronic disease when I was...
I never saw it in my classmates.
I never saw it in my friends.
So when I started seeing all these kids now appearing suddenly with autism, which I'd never heard of as a kid, I was raised on the spear tip of the movement for rights for people with intellectual disabilities.
I worked in Special Olympics from before it was founded, from when it was still Camp Shriver.
My aunt, Una Shriver, founded it.
My cousin, Anthony Shriver, founded Best Buddies.
I worked for 200 hours and was a home for the retarded when I was in high school.
I never saw kids with autism.
And then suddenly they started appearing in the mid-1990s.
And then now we went from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 34.
We saw food allergies suddenly appear at the same time.
I never knew anybody with a peanut allergy or a And they're in every classroom now.
Autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, juvenile diabetes, ADD, all these neurological diseases suddenly just exploded in the mid-90s.
And pediatricians, about 50% of the typical pediatrician's office funding comes from the vaccines.
Right.
And it's not just from giving the shot, but it's also from, and this is something you point out, from the guaranteed traffic.
Because when I was a kid, I went to a pediatrician when I needed stitches, which was fairly often.
But, you know, that's the only time I went.
That's the only time I went.
But today, that traffic is guaranteed because they have to come in.
10 wellness visits.
And that makes up a huge part of their, and they're incentivized by the insurance companies.
They're given huge bonuses if they make sure that every kid is vaccinated.
And I have to think that, you know, I don't want to say pediatricians are mercenary because I think almost all pediatricians get into that job because they love children and they want to help them.
Absolutely.
But they're so blind to what's happening to this generation of kids and none of them seem to ask the basic questions that I was asking.
What the heck is happening to our children?
And really trying to figure it out and make people healthy.
Well, doctors are getting, I think, screwed in this deal, too.
I mean, they have the highest burnout rate and highest suicide rate of any profession.
And missionaries aren't committing suicide at epidemic rates.
I think the problem is the US system, one of the many dysfunctional parts about the US health system is we take the best and brightest who get into the system for the right reasons.
We saddled them with debt.
Societal expectations, and then they realize, as my sister did, that they're in a system that's not making patients better.
On the kids' front, I just want to ram home that point, and it's the reason I'm in this fight.
Genocide's a strong word, but I don't know what else to call it.
I mean, we have 25% of young adults having fatty liver disease, which is something a doctor would never see, the 33% prediabetes rate, the 50% overweight or obese.
Everything is going up at once.
We have cancer exploding among kids.
The New York Times recently does study saying puberty rates are plummeting and nobody knows why.
We know why.
And I just want to be clear.
I think sperm counts have gone down 50% since 1970.
Sperm count.
Yeah.
American health.
You know, I was a political...
I'm an idealistic guy.
This was never my issue of nutrition, but I think it's clear to anyone, frankly clear to a lot of people.
You said people aren't talking about this.
Thanks to you and thanks to independent media, people are talking about this.
I think people are waking up.
The mainstream media that's paid for 60% by pharma isn't talking about this, but everyone else is.
And I think you have to agree this – and I think anyone thinking about this has to agree this is the biggest issue in the country.
It's an existential issue, not only from a moral perspective and a human capital perspective where we have a generation right now of young people who are going to be diabetic and, frankly, infertile.
Our literal reproductive systems are shutting down almost at a – almost – Just an alarming, almost genocidal rate.
It's also an economic catastrophe because you're signing a check for that kid who has metabolic dysfunction to just explode costs with the healthcare system when you could take them off of the rolls.
The only way we're going to curb healthcare costs is for people to be healthier.
We talk like more access and more drugs and we're going to drug our way out of the problem.
That hasn't worked.
We have to get kids healthier.
I mean, my pitch...
Robert, and what we've been working on is how to operationalize your ideas.
And I think there is an opportunity for the next president to have bold executive orders.
I think this is worthy of a state of emergency, quite frankly.
I think if there's one state of emergency much more important than the COVID, it's what's happening to children's health.
It is the definition of an emergency.
And, you know, I think if there's one issue to take decisive action on, it's that.
I will declare a state of emergency when I get in there.
And because we need to act dramatically to make sure that this is over.
And it's costing us $4.3 trillion a year that's bankrupting us.
We're destroying our country.
It's existential, as you said.
When my uncle was president, 6% of the GDP went to health care.
Today it's 22%, 20-22%.
It's almost three times our military budget.
And we're the sickest country in the world.
So, you know, all these huge expenditures are just making us sicker and sicker and sicker because we're spending it on the wrong thing.
We're spending it on the pills and the potions and the powders rather than on actually getting people healthy, building their immune systems.
And we, you know, as I said, we have the highest death rate by far of any country from COVID. And nobody's answering that question.
People are getting awards.
Fauci got a million dollar award for managing it.
It literally was the worst record of any health ministers, health regulators on earth.
It's weird that nobody is talking about it.
We have an existential event.
And what's so...
What's so frustrating is that this can be solved, as you point out, so quickly.
If Dr.
Fauci, if the president, if the head of Harvard Med School, if the head of the IRS stood at Congress and said, we must reduce ultra-processed food, we must shift spending from Band-Aids like Ozempic to food and exercise interventions,
we can Filter Medicaid money to diabetic folks to incentivize them to exercise, to fix our food system, to invest in regenerative agriculture, to get control of the situation where we are fundamentally poisoning kids and then profiting our largest and fastest growing industry by pilling people and jabbing them for the rest of their lives.
This is not a way to build a Can make that statement tomorrow, and there are very straightforward policies to pass.
We, right now, the USDA recommends sugar to two-year-olds, up to 10% of the diet.
The USDA recently came out with a study funded by food companies as well, saying a child can have 91% of their diet ultra-processed food and be perfectly healthy.
The FDA is 75% funded by pharma and fundamentally an entity that's built for the growth of pharma.
These things can be unwound.
With the stroke of a pin, as you mentioned, we can cut pharma ads and stop being one of only two countries that allow pharma ads that not only allow that to impact consumers, but allow them to buy the news itself.
The pharma ads and the 60% of the fact that we allow that is why CNN and MSNBC and major networks have no curiosity about why 33% of young adults have prediabetes.
What could possibly be a larger story than that?
No curiosity.
It's why they censored any kind of dissent during COVID. Because it was all about promoting the pharmaceutical narrative without question.
Nobody who questioned it, you know, Jay Bakhtaria and all these extraordinary scientists who were saying, wait a minute, slow down here, this is going in the wrong direction.
They were banned from television.
Dr.
Jay is a hero, yeah.
All right, my friend.
I'll see you.
Robert, thank you so much.
We're working on those executive orders.
We're just trying to operationalize what you're saying and be ready for you.
Be ready.
If the world's going to change.
Thank you.
Whatever we can do to help, we're proud to be in the fight with you.
You know, I was hiking with Mark Hyman this morning.
Oh, good.
So, he's one of my best friends.
Oh, he's our hero and our first investor.
Very close with what we're doing, yeah.
Oh, good.
I didn't know that.
He didn't tell me that.
But we were...
Oh, shoot him a text.
We were chatting last night.
We're very close.
He's a hero.
He's written the front cover of our book.
He's, like, very close.
Yeah, he and I did this.
We did a kayaking trip down the Yampa River and we were on rafts and we brought a bunch of Ute Indians and some Hopi Indians with us and they were all diabetic.
And Mark, one of them went on a hike with us and he, one of the chiefs, and he was vomiting on the hike and then he was vomiting on the boat afterward.
And Mark said to him, you know, you can cure your diabetes with diet.
And he said to him, he said to Mark, well...
Hey, Mark.
Hey, Mark.
I want to put you on FaceTime for a second.
I'm getting my brain...
Oh, you are?
Oh, yeah.
No, I wanted to show you I'm here with Cali Means.
That's what I'm doing.
How are you doing, man?
How are you doing, Mark?
Cali Means.
I know, Cali.
You're a good friend.
You had a podcast with him?
Yeah, we just did a podcast.
We're talking about you, Mark.
We're talking about how much we love you.
Enjoy your brain scan, and I'll talk to you soon.
Okay, bye.
I mean, my sister read his books and radicalized her, said one book taught her more than Stanford Med School.
And then we both become, my sister and I both have startups.
