Dr. Casey Means: RFK, Jr. fighting the good fight against processed foods

One of the issues that he talked about was having safe food and ending the chronic disease epidemic. Our children are now the unhealthiest, sickest children in the world. Don't you want healthy children? And don't you want the chemicals out of our food? And don't you want the regulatory agencies to be free from corporate corruption?

And that was RFK who got the biggest applause after he decided to endorse Donald Trump. Not that they agree on everything, they agree on that especially. They need to get along personally on the healthy foods and finding out what we're eating and why the numbers are going up and why America is fatter than ever. Yet we know more about fitness.

We are working out a lot, but it's just not working out for us. Dr. Casey Means knows all that. She was with us before. Our number one best-selling book, Good Energy, is still selling huge.

The surprising connection between metabolism and limitless health. And Dr. Casey Means joins us now. Welcome back, Casey. Brian, so great to see you.

Congratulations on all the success, but we kind of knew it when you were in here because people were giving you what type of response to your book? You know, the Americans are sick and tired of being sick. We understand that there are so many levers of our policy right now that are against American health.

And like RFK said in that speech, American health is getting destroyed and Americans are tired of it. When you just look at the statistics, it absolutely speaks for itself. Children's health is worse than ever. Forty percent of children are overweight or obese. Thirty-six percent of children have a mental, emotional, or behavioral disorder. Autism rates are one in twenty-two. In California, eighteen percent of teens have fatty liver disease. Young adult cancers are up seventy-nine percent. We're on track to have one in two American adults with cancer in their lifetime. This is absolutely astronomical and it is a historic moment that at the highest levels of politics, we are now calling this out and talking about the rigged institutions that are making our country a fertile ground for childhood chronic disease. Right, so Dr. Casey Means with us also, if you want to watch on the app, you could see it.

You could watch it on Fox Nation, but she's on Skype and you know we're always streaming. So, when you heard RFK talk, does he get it? Does he know what you know? RFK gets it completely. He has been fighting this battle for decades.

He's been fighting it in the courts. He's gone up against Monsanto. What RFK really understands is the nexus of pharma, ultra-processed food, industrial agriculture, and government, which is keeping Americans sick and which we need to unpack this nexus in order to make Americans healthy. He's hitting all the key points, the conflicts of interest in our government agencies, the lack of regulation around the toxins in our food, our water, our air, our homes.

He really does understand the many factors that are keeping Americans sick. I remember in the 70s, I'm older than you, but parents used to smoke. Smoking is down very low now. Everyone used to smoke in the movies, smoke in the car with the windows closed. We didn't worry about what our cars were spewing out of the tailpipe. We did find a way to clean up our air, we thought, to clean up our waters, we thought, and to have a healthier lifestyle. Where am I wrong?

This is exactly right. I think a key point that you're bringing up does have to do with the cigarette industry. What a lot of people do not know is that the ultra-processed food industry that is keeping Americans sick and dependent on the healthcare industry was created by the cigarette industry. Two of the largest mergers in the 1980s, once the favor for cigarettes started declining, two of the largest mergers in history before the 1990s were in the 1980s and it was R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris, two cigarette companies buying processed food companies and then using the same playbook that we looked at for cigarettes, make the product addictive and cheap and apply it to processed food. In the 1980s, we saw skyrocketing of the ubiquity of ultra-processed food and this coincides when Americans and especially children started getting very, very sick.

So same playbook applied to a different industry, transferring the scientific knowledge of addiction from one to another as one fell out of favor. And now we're seeing what the repercussions of that are with 75% of American adults over the age of 55 having a chronic illness tied to food. This is costing our country 90% of our $4.3 trillion healthcare budget. 23% of the largest GDP in the world is going to healthcare, which 90% of it is going towards chronic illnesses related to food. Every American taxpayer should care about this issue. So you're saying Big Pharma, the food industry, want us sick to make a profit?

It's a devil's bargain, Brian. The two are the largest industries in the country and healthcare is the largest and fastest growing industry in the United States. It's a business that's designed to grow. It's a $4.3 trillion industry.

This is the simple economic unemotional reality. It makes more money when patients are sick and it makes less money when patients are healthy. Right now, one of the other largest industries in the United States, which is the ultra-processed food industry, is leading to chronic illness. And so right now we have two industries that unfortunately, even with the best intentions of the people in those industries at the individual level, they are both economically benefiting off patients who are sick and dependent on ultra-processed food, then getting sick and are sick and dependent on the healthcare system. The numbers are overwhelming.

They're indisputable either. 74% of Americans are overweight. 77% can't serve in the military, even if they were drafted tomorrow. And I'm not sure if it's related or not, but you mentioned that autism number right up top. You say one in, can you give me those percentages again? One in 36 American children now has autism. In California, where I live, that number is one in 22. This is up astronomically in the past 24 years. It used to be one in 1500, 20, 20 years ago?

It has been one in 150 in recent years, and then decades ago it was one in 1500, and it is skyrocketing. And your belief that food has a lot to do with that, because we hear things about inoculations, vaccines, and they say that's been disputed and it's unrelated. Many of these diseases are multi-factorial in nature, but what we have to understand is that the small bodies of children being born into this world, starting in fetal life, are being born into a toxic stew that they are not being protected from.

And this is across all levels of society. We are over-medicating children. 70% of a child's diet is coming from ultra-processed food filled with chemicals that are banned in other countries.

They are banned in Europe. Many of the chemicals that are in our ultra-processed foods like food dyes and preservatives that we know have an effect on children's behavior and brains. We look at what's happening with the food also in terms of pesticides. There are 6 billion pounds of these toxic pesticides being sprayed on this food that then is going towards children's ultra-processed foods. So Brian, the bigger picture is that kids are being born into a toxic stew of many forever chemicals, endocrine-disrupting chemicals, and chemicals that we know impair neurologic development across food, environment, and medications, and their bodies are getting crushed. And as adults, and policy makers, and media, we need to have the moral clarity to say enough is enough. Kids are too sick with preventable illnesses, and we've got to clean up the environment, we've got to protect our children. And I am so deeply encouraged that this conversation is being had clearly at the highest level of government, and it's becoming, over the last few weeks, an election topic. This is going to be on the debate stage, and I think we can all feel very grateful for that. So Dr. Casey Means with us, co-author of Good Energy along with her brother, book's number one in the country. So can you give me a definition of a processed food?

Absolutely. So an ultra-processed food is a food that is created in a factory. It's made from various extracted and adulterated parts of other food that are put together like a puzzle into a Frankenfood that's really never before been seen in nature.

So it's taking constituent parts from other whole foods that have been broken down and then remodeled into a Frankenstein-like food, comes from a factory packaged, often filled with preservatives and colorings to make it hyper-palatable. This is an invention that, again, only started becoming ubiquitous in the 1980s. So it's not like we've had these forever. It's not like this is the only thing kids will eat.

They're brand new. This is now making up 70% of the calories that we eat. And so this is the types of things that's lining all the middle aisles of the grocery store, the things that are in the box. And they taste good, right?

That's part of the attraction. They are designed, they are weaponized and designed by food scientists to take you to your bliss point, to be hyper-palatable and to include ingredients that turn down our satiety mechanisms to make us eat more. You look at a Pringles box, it literally tells you right on the package, once you pop, you just can't stop. It's designed to have all the components to activate your reward circuitry so you want as much as possible and to sneak in ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup that actually we know biochemically make us more hungry.

So these foods are designed to get you to eat nutrient-depleted, pesticide-covered food with chemicals that make us feel like we're insatiable. And this is why ultra-processed foods are why Americans are eating themselves to death, which is what is happening in our country. Do you believe the system is curable? Do you believe if an RFK gets in there, he could take that knowledge that you've done and scientists alongside you be able to go in there and streamline a process that is so fortified?

This is absolutely solvable and truly everyone can be a winner here. Industry, people and children. But we need to move back to eating real foods. I do believe that there are some simple policy changes that we could make in our country that could happen in the first year of an administration that could absolutely turn the tides backwards towards American health. And I think the political appetite is strong for that right now. We know Americans are sick of this.

They are cheering at the rallies. They want to hear about getting rid of the toxins in our food. They want to hear about a cleaner, more sustainable food system. So I think the appetite is there, the political will, and some of the policy solutions are being presented right now.

And it's very, very exciting. And where do you shop? Where do you buy your food? Farmers market.

The best place that anyone can shop. There are 9000 farmers markets in the United States. And the key point about the farmers market is it's the freshest food and the least toxins. The freshest is important because fresh food has the most nutrients. As a food travels 1500 miles from a factory to your plate, it's losing its nutrients every single day. And as it gets processed, it's losing nutrients.

Our cellular biology, the reason we're all sick kids and adults is because our cellular biology is broken by the lack of good nutrients that we're getting in our food. So buying food as local as possible, as clean as possible without the pesticides and the additives is one of the best things you can do to give yourselves the power to do their best work and minimize chronic illness. If that's not an option, then of course buying at something like a health food store, Whole Foods, with organic and unprocessed is great. But truly, for people who don't have access to either of those, unprocessed, real food, not in a package, ideally organic is incredible. It's also sinful. They put all that fast food and horrible food in most working class areas, most hard up areas where it makes it their diet is even more challenging and makes it affordable. Say, OK, that's cheap.

I'll eat it. But then they feel it. Then they get unhealthy and they don't necessarily have the health care to fix them.

Have you noticed that? Well, this is where policy comes in, Brian. So with some simple fixes, we could fill these neighborhoods with healthy, fresh food because because industry follows the money. So right now on public assistance, food programs like Snap and WIC, 10 percent of that food is going straight to soda and over 50 percent is going to ultra processed food. So we allow people on public assistance programs to funnel that money towards food. We could incentivize those programs to get better value if you're buying real food.

We don't do that right now. Number two, our farm bill subsidies are what make those unhealthy foods cheaper. Almost all of our food farm bill subsidies goes to commodity crops, not healthy foods, commodity crops like corn, wheat and soy that are turned into the backbone of ultra processed food. So taxpayers are not only paying for the farm bill subsidies that make the toxic food cheaper, they're also paying for the food assistance that goes towards processed food. And they're paying for the environmental externalities of that toxic food production, as well as the health care costs of Americans who are getting sick because of the processed food.

So as taxpayers, we need to make this a key issue because we're paying for it on all sides and get together with farmers. What do you think about the Time magazine downplaying the ultra processed foods? One of the more amusing things that we've seen is the mainstream media playbook trying to do what they love to do, which is confuse people into thinking that we don't have a grip on reality by saying, what if ultra processed foods aren't as bad as we think?

That was the title of the article. And fortunately, people took to social media in hordes saying we are no longer standing silent while the media tries to gaslight us into questioning the reality that we know is true, which is that this packaged food is trash. And I'll just briefly run through what the media does to make us question our reality about food.

They deny the science and seed confusion. They always will invoke social justice, which they did in this article to shut down conversation. They said that this is what people in America are eating. If you take it away, what are they going to eat without talking about the fact that our system is rigged to make this food cheaper and more accessible to marginalized populations and is hurting them? And we could change the policies to make healthy food cheaper. So we see confusion.

We invoke social justice to shut down conversation. They normalize ultra processed foods. Talk about, oh, well, this is 70 percent of calories that Americans are eating and we are fine. We're not fine. We are almost universally chronically ill. And the fourth thing they do is they do not mention the conflict of interest of the scientists and the nutritionists that they cite in the article. So this is the four part playbook that media uses to confuse us about nutrition. But we all know what's what the reality is. The reality is, is that these ultra processed foods are not good for us. And we need to get back to real food. Let's hope, let's hope, Casey, that this comes up in the debate because.

And the good news is Time article changed, Time magazine changed the title to a different title because social media was an outrage. So our voices matter. Absolutely. So does yours.

And so does your brother's. Dr. Casey means pick up her book if you haven't yet. Good Energy.

The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health. Casey, great. Thanks so much for the time. Appreciate it. Talk to you, Brian. You got it from the Fox News Podcast Network.