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Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com slash podcast. Terms apply. I'm James McComb, reporting live from home in my bathrobe and slippers. Tonight, we're talking Dunkin' Polar Peppermint Coffee. Gene's here with the latest. Gene, do you copy?
The home with Dunkin' is where you want to be. So one of my most interesting interviews, I thought anyway was good energy. The co-authors, brother and sister, also rare.
Cali Means is a doctor. Her brother is a real enterprising businessman, and they wanted to focus on health after something happened with their parents, with their mom. And the name of this book is called Good Energy, the Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health. They're unendingly fascinated to talk to. They're the co-founder of TruMed Payments. And you'll love their background, and you'll love their story. I also think you're going to love their book. Let's relive those interviews. And maybe for you, it's the first time.
Let's go. Yeah, so my co-authors, my sister and my sister at Stanford Med School did not take one course on nutrition. She figured out that actually 80% of the entire course was on pharmacology and the majority of Stanford Med School, Harvard Med School's budget comes from pharma.
I used to work for the food and pharma industry and actually saw these stems up close. And what we've put together is a very simple economic fact. It's not conspiratorial. It's a simple statement of economic fact is that the largest industry in the country, the healthcare industry, they make money when your kid is sick, depressed and fertile. They make money by treating those conditions and managing those conditions. And they lose money when we learn metabolic habits, when we learn the basics and get out of that chronic disease. So instead of you're saying medicine solving those problems, they're creating those problems to solve and make money. Nine out of ten leading causes of death in America are preventable lifestyle conditions. 95% of all medical spending is on completely preventable chronic conditions. If you have an acute issue, if you have a gunshot wound, burst appendix, complicated childbirth, infection, go to the doctor.
Absolutely. That's 5% of medical spending. Chronic disease is the greatest profit generating mechanism in modern history. And this amoeba of the healthcare system, again, our largest industry and fastest growing, is predicated on us getting more chronic diseases. That's just a simple economic fact. So you mean major food companies, the Procter and Gamble, the General Mills, they're in bed meeting with the medical associations in order to do this?
They actually literally are. So working for the food companies as a lobbyist and the pharma industry actually brokered payments between Coke and the American Diabetes Association. The American Diabetes Association, which sets the standard of care for diabetes management in this country, which is a scourge and really underpinning all other chronic conditions, except millions of dollars from diabetes water, from Coca-Cola, they should be shouting from the rooftop about the fact that kids are ingesting 100 times more sugar than they did 100 years ago. The reason we're getting sicker, more depressed, more infertile isn't complicated. It's because of our broken food system. This is unique in America. In Japan, the childhood obesity rate is 3%. Here it's upwards of 25%. And you don't think it's because our kids are less active?
Absolutely. The sanitary lifestyle, which we incentivize too, is a huge problem. The book is about the underpinnings of metabolic health, which is simple. It's our diet, it's environmental toxins, it's sleep, it's exercise, it's the basics. But working for the food companies, I also help steer money to exercise groups to distract the issue.
Michelle Obama talked about food in the first year when she was on this campaign in the White House, which was right, but she actually got paid off by the food industry to start talking about exercise. We should not be distracted. Our food system is compromised. And not only is our medical system silent on the reason we're getting sick, and they're overcomplicating the reason we're getting sick. And if you have diabetes, heart disease, depression, other comorbidities, you're going to see multiple doctors from multiple treatment plans on those.
This is what the book's about. This is the most important issue in our country, which I think does tie to politics because we're going to lose our human capital and we're going to go bankrupt from this. Chronic diseases are interrelated, and that simplicity is ignored by our medical system because it's profitable to keep people sick and manage the condition. And would you say also it's cheaper to get the food that's bad for you when you got to go out of your way and pay more for the food that's good for you?
Let's break this down. On the food side, it makes sense. It's in their interest to keep food cheap and keep it addictive. There's been a complete crony capitalist takeover of our regulatory agencies. The USDA that makes our nutrition guidelines for kids, 95% of the USDA panel was paid off for by food companies, which is just harder.
What do you mean by paid off? The direct contributions, not research grants, but actually direct consulting payments. 95% of the USDA panel received direct consulting payments from processed food companies and or pharmaceutical companies. Wouldn't you want the USDA to be, if you're creating a food that you want mass produced, wouldn't you want the USDA to support it? So wouldn't you go out of your way to have them approve it? Hey, I'm working on this.
I'm working on that. The USDA, this is not political. This is not even getting into policy. The USDA that makes the guidelines for food that go to our kids should be following the science, should be uncorrupted. They should not be taking money from Coca-Cola. They should not be taking money from Kraft. Okay. They have taken that money.
They're directly paid off. I helped do it. And the guidelines we exist under today say that a two year old should have 10% of their diet as added sugar, a two year old. When we have a metabolic health crisis among children and 33% of young adults have pre-diabetes right now, 50% of young adults are overweight or obese. And we have the panel that is making our medical guidelines saying that a two year old should be eating sugar, added sugar.
It's unconscionable. So let me ask you, when did this relationship first start? The devil's bargain between food and pharma? It started actually in 1960 with the invention of the birth control pill.
The birth control pill was the first drug in American history that you didn't stop taking after you were cured of the condition. And there's documentation of this. The pharmaceutical industry taking a lot of trust of science with antibiotics and some medical innovations helping to win World War II. They said, we can take that trust. And this is documented. And they said, we're going to now invent chronic conditions.
What a goldmine. You can take a pill for your entire life. You don't get cured.
And now what do we have? We have stans. One of the most prescribed drugs in the country. The more stans are prescribed, the more heart disease goes up. The more metformin is prescribed, 100 million plus prescriptions of that, the more diabetes goes up. The more antidepressants are prescribed. 25% of women in the United States are on an antidepressant. The more suicide and depressions goes up. There has never been a chronic disease pharmaceutical treatment that has lower rates of the chronic disease trying to treat. And this is amazing because people just keep racking on the comorbidities and racking on the interventions. So Kelly Means, our guest, Good Energy, the book, the surprising connection between metabolism and limitless health. So Kelly, you realize how many people would have to have this evil intention for this to come off?
I mean, think about what doctor would go to sleep at night saying, OK, I just got a drug. I'm going to get a percentage of money from a drug because someone's chronic has a chronic disease, which I helped create. This is not about intention to understand a system. Don't look at what people say.
Don't even look at what individuals think. Look at what the system does. It is a completely unemotional statement of economic fact that the health care industry growth is predicated on more kids getting sicker earlier and staying sick. The industry just fundamentally makes money for managing interventions on people that are sick.
And when you have the largest interesting country that's fundamentally incentivized for more Americans to get sick, that's what happens. The brilliance and this is what we unpack in the book and what has really taken me a long time to understand the genius of the institutional design of our health care system is that it takes good people. It takes my sister who got into this for the right reasons. All doctors do.
They can make money in easier ways. It saddles them with that. And now the highest suicide rate and the highest burnout rate of any profession is among doctors. They understand they are trapped in a sick system. I absolutely believe that cardiologists want to cure and snap their fingers and cure the world of heart disease, that hormone doctors want to cure the world of diabetes, that obesity doctors now want to cure the world of obesity.
But their job and their employment is predicated on more people getting sick. That is just a fact. What do you think about Ozympic? So Ozympic is a great example. And all the other drugs like that.
Yeah, yeah. Well, I think it's really important to go into specifics. Ozympic, I believe, is one of the biggest issues in the country.
And here's why. The American Academy of Pediatrics, which is a fully funded subsidiary of pharma, but sets the standard of care for pediatric care, recently said that this should be the first line of defense for any obese or overweight 12 year old. That's 50 percent of 12 year olds.
I have a message to every parent listening. If your child is the median 12 year old who's overweight or obese, they are going to be pushed Ozympic, which is a lifetime drug with just demonstrably the highest side effects of any wide scale drug approved in modern American history. 50 percent of people go off because of severe vomiting or nausea, which clearly means there's other things going on.
So 50 percent of people who get on Ozymic get off because you feel so terrible. It's the worst and most pronounced side effects of a drug in modern American history that's been widely prescribed. Yes, it is causing unknown gastrointestinal issues that are leading to severe nausea and vomiting. It has a black box warning for cancer. There's an EU investigation of suicidal ideation. What's a black box warning mean? Black box warning means the most serious warning the FDA can give on thyroid cancer because of the cause of such hormone disruption.
It is there's large scale investigations in the EU, its home, its home area. This is a company from Denmark on suicidal ideation, which makes sense, Brian. Our medical system doesn't realize the interconnectivity. But 95 percent of our serotonin, which regulates our contentment and mood, is produced in the gut, not the brain. And Ozympic is gut dysfunction. That's what it causes. That's the that's the effect of drugs. There's serious side effects. This is being rushed because it's a lifetime drug and it's being pushed now on 12 year olds. The key question with Ozympic is we have an obesity crisis where 80 percent of American adults and 50 percent of young adults are overweight or obese. Is this because of Ozympic deficiency or is this because we're uniquely poisoning our population in America?
This should not be the standard of care. So Cali Means was helping us out there. Casey is the doctor and the sister of Cali. Such an impressive book. So many questions need to be answered.
He's so bold and smart. And they both, by the way, look extremely healthy. When we come back, let's talk about with Cali about the side effects and dangers of Ozympic. Listen up, everybody. You'll need to hear it. You'll listen to the Brain Kill Me show.
Our Christmas gift to you. The best of the Brian Kill Me show. Breaking news, unique opinions. Hear it all on the Brian Kill Me show. Welcome back, everybody. It's time for part two of a book you need to hear about that you probably heard some buzz about. And the name of the book is Good Energy. Cali Means is my guest.
And I spoke to Cali late last week because they were in town about him and his sister, how this whole book came to be. And I was just going through medical school, realized it was something seriously wrong about the medical profession. So she tried to change it. They've created a brand new company.
But here we talk about the rage in this country, and that's Ozympic. It's the end of obesity, they claim. But is there a downside? They say absolutely.
Here is more of my interview with Cali Means on the Brian Kill Me show. You also write that muscle depletion is real. And the only way to avoid the muscle depletion is have a high protein diet, low fat.
Which, by the way, if you have that, you're going to lose weight anyway. This is a game. And I know you had some other guests on who are writing books. We don't need a book on this. We don't need a long diatribe on this to make money from the Ozympic craze. We need to speak in very plain facts.
Any doctor, actually, if they're pushed, will tell you. And they actually say this, and they guide this. You are going to have severe muscle loss issues if you don't work out five times a week with strength training and shift your diet to a low ultra-processed food, high protein diet. My point, what we're doing with this book, which is resonating, is now the number one book on Amazon, which we're really excited about. And this message of empowerment really is resonating. What I'm doing with my company, True Med, which actually incentivizes with medical dollars, food, and exercise, doctors could be writing a letter of medical necessity actually guiding the patients to keto diets, to exercise. We can actually be shifting the $4.5 trillion when somebody is prediabetic or obese to those things. The American people don't want to be fat, sick, depressed, infertile, which is also happening to an astounding degree.
They don't want this. My mom didn't want to get cancer and die and not meet her grandkids. Is she not eating well? My mom was on the standard American food pyramid diet.
She was the standard American patient for 40 years. There were warning signs, slightly high cholesterol. That's normal. Take the statin.
Prediabetes, like 60% of people her age. Oh, that's normal. Take the metformin, slightly high blood pressure. Oh, that's normal. Take the ACE inhibitor. She had these checks that the average American goes on throughout their life where it's, oh, no, it's no problem. That's normal. That's average for people your age.
Take the pill. If once her doctor sat her down and explained that pancreatic cancer, which she eventually got, is as highly tied to prediabetes and blood sugar circulation as smoking is to lung cancer, cancer is not a random occurrence. It's highly tied to our diet.
It's highly tied to metabolic health. If she was explained and incentivized and educated on really reversing these conditions with basic metabolic habits, she'd still be here. But she just months before cancer diagnosis was told by her primary care provider that she was healthy for her age. On five medications, she was actually on less amount of medications than the average 70-year-old.
She was actually a healthy patient. Life expects right now, Brian, is declining for the most sustained period since 1860. This year in 2024, we have the highest rates of cancer, highest rates of diabetes, highest rates of heart disease, highest rates of autism, autoimmune conditions. Go down the list of any condition ever in American history. Every single chronic condition is at an all-time high this year. Something is going very wrong.
And the problem with those OZYMPIC, again, this is very simple. Are we going to look at this devastation happening, particularly to kids? And are we going to drug kids for life with this poison, literal poison, that you have to stay on forever? Or are we going to finally ask, as America, and it's uniquely in America, they're not prescribing OZYMPIC as the standard of care in their home country, in Denmark. If you have prediabetes, you actually get a government-subsidized medical keto diet. They actually pay you to exercise. These are just rational policies that any one crew would create to actually attack the root cause.
But again, I cannot stress this enough. Every lever of the healthcare system is geared to making people sick. The other thing we talk about in the book, you just look at the money. Pharma pays five times more in political donations than the oil industry. Pharma funds a lot of the media. Pharma funds a lot of these interest groups, like the NAACP, actually, that's calling anyone that criticizes OZYMPIC racist right now. The NAACP is a registered lobbyist for the maker of OZYMPIC to say it's a civil rights issue that we have to have government sponsors. Is there a sense that obesity is large in the black community?
How do they rationalize that? Well, this is just the playbook. I helped co-pay the NAACP ten years ago to say that taking soda off of food stamps, it's the number one item on food stamps, that it was racist to deny choice to lower-income people. This is the playbook, as we all know, and there's nobody better than the food and pharma industries.
You call people racist, you call people sexist, and these groups like the NAACP unfortunately... Have you felt backlash as you wrote your book? And now that it's out and doing well, good energy? When my mom literally, as we buried her the 12 days, 13 days before her diagnosis and her death, was transformational, my sister and I, we really saw and a lot of these pieces came together from our two careers. And we really feel like we're carrying on her memory and trying to prevent, again, the many, many people listening here who are probably on that chronic disease pharmaceutical treadmill. We can get off that path. There is a better way.
Where do you go? Do you provide that better way? What are some tips we can leave some people with to start getting control of their diet? If you have an acute issue, if you have an infection or something that's going to kill you right away, listen to the medical system. If you have a chronic condition or your kid has a chronic condition, they're trying to put your kid on a statin, metformin, any of these drugs that are doubling rates of the prescriptions among teens in the past five years, do not trust your doctor. It's just that simple.
The doctor, any doctor, a good doctor, should be writing an intervention for basic things, for exercise interventions, for sleep, which is down 25% in the past 100 years, and for food. And where do you shop? What's up? Where should you shop? You should be avoiding three ingredients, highly processed grains, sugar, and seed oils. You should be scouring your labels for that. In Japan and some European countries, the ultra-processed food consumption things in a box is 20 to 30% here at 70%. If you can just simply cut those ingredients, which by definition cuts ultra-processed food, you are on a great path. Food in a box. Avoid it.
100%. Cereal. I am engaged in a legal action against Kellogg. They actually reformulate their cereal with different ingredients for Americans because our regulations are so bought off. They contain artificial dyes, which they don't contain in any other country, which are one of the most known links to ADHD. These dyes that they include in their cereal absolutely avoid that. The grains in the United States are highly problematic. These ultra-processed, frankenfoods that are sprayed with glyphosate and other chemicals that are banned in almost every other country. It's, A, just weaponized fundamentally to make us want to eat more, and I'm really concerned about the chemicals on these foods, which are disrupting our gut bacteria and just causing this host of issues.
But all this stuff is in Good Energy, your brand new book. We outlined the problem, and through my sister's genius, who's a leading metabolic health doctor, we have an actionable plan. We've got to have a bottoms-up revolution. Brian, I'm also engaged with a lot of great people and companies to lobby. We're working with across the aisle, frankly.
You see President Trump talking about this, RFK talking about this. This issue of kids getting sick and then being drugged is, I think, becoming one of the defining issues in our country. All right, the name of the book is Good Energy, the surprising connection between metabolism and limitless health. Callie Meads, congratulations on doing it, and to your sister.
Thank you, sir. Good Energy, the surprising connection between metabolism and limitless health, and Dr. Casey Means joins us now. I see you in person now, and your brother I saw last two weeks ago, and one of your best advertisements for your book is that you both look so healthy.
I mean, that's one of the things... As do you. Right. Oh, thank you, but I didn't write a health book.
But I think it always helps when someone writes a book and says, this is what's going on, and you subscribe to it. Thank you. And just to give people some background before we get to your book, for you, you're going through, you're becoming a doctor. Your brother was.
Yeah. And you were describing what it was like that you were going through. You went all the way through your residency, and what were you discovering that disillusioned you along the way? Yeah, four years Stanford Medical School, four and a half years of head and neck surgery residency.
I'm nine years into training, and I look around me and I realize, you know, I've kind of been in this tunnel vision, like this is the answer. Conventional medicine is the answer, but I look around me at the trends. I'm cutting into people all day long, and Americans are getting sicker every year. We're spending $4.3 trillion on health care costs, and Americans are getting sicker every single year, Brian. Life expectancy is going down in the United States. Even since the pandemic. I thought the pandemic was the reason for that. The pandemic is not the reason. It started having a sustained decline before the pandemic, the longest period of decline of health since 1860s.
We are going down. So we extended lifespan in the early 1900s due to infectious disease control. Now it's going down because of chronic lifestyle conditions rooted in metabolic dysfunction, and 93% of American adults now have metabolic dysfunction tied to food and lifestyle.
So that's what's killing us now. It's not the infectious diseases. It's these lifestyle diseases based on our toxic food system, our sedentary lifestyle, our poor habits. So what's metabolic dysfunction?
How do you define that? Yeah, so metabolic health is basically the core foundational process in our bodies that make energy. We have 40 trillion cells. They all need energy to function. All the chemical reactions happening in our body need energy. That all bubbles up into our lives. That's the core of metabolic health.
You remember from high school biology, the mitochondria, powerhouse of the cell, that's metabolism. Right now, because of basically every aspect of our modern Western world, our toxic ultra-processed food system, we're sitting all the time, we're sleeping 25% less than we were 100 years ago. There's 80,000 synthetic toxins in our food, water, air, personal care products. Our emotional health and stress is poor through the roof. All of those are hurting our metabolic health. And so we have this problem where literally research on the American College of Cardiology says that 93% of Americans have this fundamental problem in how we power our bodies, the most foundational part of health. And that we know now, the science is telling us that leads to cancer, type 2 diabetes, obesity, stroke, fatty liver disease, cancer, all of the conditions that are going up all at once. And everyone's waving their hands saying, we have no idea why. The science is telling us exactly why.
Because we have this fundamental problem in our bodies tied to food and lifestyle. Colon cancer, too, is up, isn't it? On younger people.
On young people going up. This is the first year in history that we are expected to have over 2 million new cases of cancer in the United States. So we are throwing money at cancer research and cancer rates are going up. The reason for this is because we're focusing on the symptoms of cancer. We're focusing on treating cancer after it develops. We spend virtually zero dollars on cancer prevention.
We know that much cancer, especially colon cancer, is tied to our terrible, ultra-processed diets in the United States. So, you know, there's plausible deniability. We're working so hard, but the rates are going up. We don't know why. We do know why.
It's because of the environment that we're living in. And unfortunately, there's trillions and trillions of dollars of incentives between this devil's bargain of the food system and the healthcare system that both make money when we're addicted to crappy food and then we're getting treatment. And so, you know, I think the thing that people really need to understand is that the financial incentives of our healthcare system right now, they make more money when patients are sick and it makes less money when patients are healthy. That's why I had to leave the system because that is the financial reality of the American healthcare system. What are the grand secret, grand higher-up meetings behind closed doors among the rich and the powerful in the medical profession and the big pharma that say we're going to keep Americans sick in order to make money? Are they in cahoots? You know, I mean, it's hard to say, right?
I haven't been in those rooms. I know that there is about $6 trillion invisible hand that totally benefits off of us being sick. $4.3 trillion of healthcare costs and then over $2 trillion of ultra-processed food system. In the 1980s, three of the four biggest mergers that happened were cigarette companies acquiring ultra-processed food companies. So like Philip Morris acquiring Kraft. So we know that there's some understanding there about addiction as a business model, right? That's what's happening with ultra-processed foods. They're following the exact same playbook as cigarettes. So, you know, I can't say but I think that you've got a really, really big incentive problem that benefits off sick dependent Americans and we have to be aware of that. Jon Stewart was on filling in on two bears in one cave podcast yesterday and he talked about this.
Cut 38. Even if you look at food stamps, right? So food stamps ostensibly is like a pretty good program. First of all, there shouldn't be food insecurity in a country as rich as this.
That's just ridiculous. But the really strange part of it to me is food stamps are really a subsidy to Kraft or Nabisco or the giant food conglomerates because the majority of the foods that people are buying are these ultra-processed **** box foods. They're going to sodas and **** foods that go right into PepsiCo.
Like, we don't do anything that doesn't have a middleman with a corporate owner to it. So all that government money goes, it's really their subsidies. Like, why is there corn syrup in everything? It's the **** government just paying farmers for and then they're just giving the corn syrup and fructose to.
And so what do they do? They give us all **** diabetes and then what's the next step? Big Pharma comes in and now you're in the cycle. They're literally combating the drug of ultra-processed food with the drugs from Big Pharma. And Casey, you're nodding along.
They nailed it. This is why I left the system to become an evangelist for root cause health. Right now, SNAP, which is the largest federal system program for food, you've also got WIC for mothers and children. It is, in many ways, because of a rigged system, because we are allowed to buy soda on SNAP.
SNAP is the number one line item on SNAP. OK, soda is diabetes water. Soda has no nutritional value and causes chronic disease. Ten percent of all SNAP funding goes towards soda, which means it is essentially money laundering from American taxpayers to ultra-processed food companies to keep people, especially people who are minorities and the poor, sick.
This is a rigged system. People say, oh, if we control what people buy on SNAP, it's a nanny state. You know, that's overreach of the government.
But you are. But by definition, you're providing food for people that need it. So, of course, you could control what they have.
Right. I mean, what if we could incentivize people buying healthy fruits and vegetables to keep them healthy? Why is it more expensive to get healthy stuff? It's more expensive because of our farm bills.
Again, this is a second tier of the rigged system. Our farm bills financially subsidize, again, taxpayer money for commodity crops like corn, wheat and soy, most of which go towards animal feed for large-scale animal production operations, not healthy beef, the bad beef that comes from these confined animal feeding operations where they're, you know, in squalor. And then the farm bills are going to the process, so the grains that go towards animal feed and ultra-processed foods. That corn, it's not going to a beautiful piece of corn you're throwing on your grill. It's going to high fructose corn syrup, which essentially makes sugar cheaper than, in many cases, water. You walk into a convenience store, soda is cheaper than water because taxpayers are paying for it.
Casey Means is here. The name of her book, the number one book in the country right now, is called Good Energy. And she's a doctor. Dr. Means, let me ask you this. What about people that push back and say we're looking to put these preservatives in order to preserve food so it can last longer? Is that a good argument? It's an argument that's been used.
It's not a good argument. When we look at processed food with preservatives in it, it has virtually no nutritional value. If you actually look at spinach straight out of the ground, it has tons of vitamin C. You process it, it has zero milligrams of vitamin C in it. So we're basically just giving people this essential, people are overfed and undernourished in our country. And what we need to do is put our innovation and our dollars towards helping people get access to fresh food.
What would pressure the system to change? It would be awareness and people boycotting this and stuff. And for example, I used to hear this a lot when I was in California after the riots in 1992, was it? They said, you know, they're poisoning our working class areas by putting nothing but fast food in our areas and a lot of liquor stores. And I thought, well, that's because people want that in that area. But no, that came first and then came the customer.
So we could somehow reverse that. And I don't want to, look, fast food has a place, I don't want to drive people out of business. But if people were only buying things that were healthy, fast food would change. Yeah, the incentives come first, then the behavior comes.
I think that's a really key point. If we simply changed what people could buy on SNAP and incentivize fresh fruits and vegetables, we'd eliminate food deserts. Because the commerce is going to follow the incentives. Right now, it's cheapest to serve people the ultra-processed grains, the seed oils, the ultra-processed sugar. That's basically the backbone of fast food, right? If we changed SNAP, if we changed the farm bill, simple incentive shifts, it would change everything.
How many people are on this? A lot of people on food stamps. So you could really make a difference by changing the basics in SNAP and food stamps. Absolutely, and the farm bill, yeah.
But there's many other layers to it from a policy standpoint, simple policies that would change a lot. Right now, the USDA school lunch program serves 3 billion meals per year to children. Okay. And it is totally corrupted by big food.
I thought Michelle Obama straightened that out. Absolutely not. There was just a brokered deal between Kraft and the USDA school lunch program to put Lunchables in schools. Does Kraft do anything to have the nutritional value in it?
No. I mean, this food is ultra-processed, frankened food filled with chemicals, artificial dyes, preservatives that really shouldn't be touching a child's body. Children in America right now are really suffering. You have 40% of 18-year-olds with a mental health diagnosis. You have cancer rates and heart disease.
Literally, we're seeing hypertension, high blood pressure in kids, and 30% of teens, Brian, have prediabetes. So I always go back and forth. I never put them together. What are we feeding them?
And also, why are they so inactive because of their phones, the Xbox, people worried about playing outside, unscripted playing doesn't happen. Nope. But you're saying it's all part of it. You got the foods are part of it.
It'd also be great to get kids more active. Yeah. I think it's a big societal shift that's happened. You know, you get, you know, you basically, I mean, this gets kind of out there, but you get women, you get women outside of the home. You know, you tell people that climbing the corporate ladder is the only way to have value in America.
Right? So you have no one actually thinking about or preparing food in the country. Then you've got kids basically eating convenience food.
Kids are getting sick. Now they're on a dopamine loop where they're addicted to sugar and they're addicted to processed foods. That, of course, predisposes them more to being addicted to their devices, their phones, video games, social media. So you've basically got this destruction of the, in many ways, I think, the foundation of American family life where kids are not eating meals with their parents anymore. Only 30% of Americans are eating more than three meals together per week. So it's just all about convenience.
And unfortunately, on many levels, I think what would solve a lot of this is people getting back to the basics, like buy real food that is grown close to your home, eat meals with your family, prepare food together. So Casey, stick around. Yeah.
I want to talk about gozemic and all these other miracle drugs as some people are saying have changed their lives and other people are saying we're still trying to find out what it's about. You have definite opinions on this and you're ready to go. Yes.
All right. So stay tuned. You listen to the Brian Kilmeade show.
Wishing you a very Merry Christmas. You're listening to the best of the Brian Kilmeade show. Welcome back.
The author, one of the authors of Good Energy, the surprising connection between metabolism and limitless health. The number one book in the country right now is here. Back with us, Dr. Casey Means, who was kind enough to come on One Nation two weeks ago.
And the book remains number one in the country in the New York Times list. So when we left, we talked about Ozempic. And you know, we were talking about Ozempic, the magic pill the week before.
Now, you have a different feeling about Ozempic, Govee and everything else. Yeah. I think what we really didn't understand is that obesity, this fat that we're literally just 3D printing on our bodies in America, 75% of Americans overweight or obese now. A hundred years ago, if you had obesity, you were in the circus.
Like literally, it didn't really exist. People need to recognize that. This is a new phenomenon. It's not a genetic issue. This is the lifestyle we're leading, the food we're eating. It's the environment causing us to be metabolically dysfunctional and therefore 3D print all this fat. Ozempic comes in and says, oh, we'll melt your fat for you and everything will be great. It's a magic pill. But unfortunately, without changing the environment, we're not actually creating health. We can melt some fat, but are we truly becoming healthy? That's the question.
And so we're kind of being gaslighted to think that a shot for life, it's a weekly injection you have to take for life, can somehow ameliorate the effects of an environment that is just crushing our health on every level. Johan Hari, you spoke with him on your show. On the show and on TV. Yeah. And he says that Americans that, yeah, of course, the drug has side effects.
Of course, it's got problems. But we have two choices. We deal with the consequence of obesity or we deal with the consequences of the drug.
We actually have a third choice, Johan. We can actually just eat real food and clean up our environment and our bodies will naturally become a healthy weight. There are many people who make simple, simple changes focused on metabolic health and they lose a drastic amount of weight.
So we have more than two choices in this. And unfortunately, because there's so little incentive for doctors to talk to patients about healthy food and lifestyle and we're so laser focused on pharmaceuticals. They don't know much about it. They don't know much. You are a doctor.
Yeah. I mean, you are a doctor. Eighty percent of medical schools do not have a single class on nutrition, even though 90 percent of health care costs right now are going to our conditions tied to food. Why is that?
Why is that? Why wouldn't they put nutrition? I'm sure there's a natural curiosity for a doctor.
You have to follow the money. You know, I think that the way that our health care system is financed right now, the way doctors and hospitals and insurance companies and pharmaceuticals all make money is have more patients in the system utilizing services for a longer period of time. This is why chronic disease, which is a new phenomenon over the past 50 to 100 years, that's why it's such a cash cow. So you are not for Ozempic and all these others? No, Ozempic is a Band-Aid. Ozempic is a Band-Aid, and right now the parent company, Novo Nordisk, which is based in Denmark, in Europe, it has surpassed Louis Vuitton, LVHM, to become the largest company in Europe.
They are profiting off the broken health care and food system in the United States, and there's an all-out war, an all-out effort right now to classify obesity as a genetic disease. Because if we do that, then we can have Ozempic covered by insurance. And if we have Ozempic covered by insurance, then we can have taxpayer money going towards it. And what that will, and this is actually up in Congress right now, this exact topic, if that happens, if Medicare starts covering this for overweight and obesity, we will essentially be funneling potentially hundreds of billions, if not eventually trillions of dollars every year from the U.S. to Denmark to a Danish company to basically put a Band-Aid on an issue caused by our broken system.
And then guess what? All of America will be paying for it because all our insurance rates are going to go higher because now we have to digest, pun intended, this new drug. And I'm not convinced it's actually going to make people healthier over the long term because if our environment stays the same, the ultra-processed food, the chronic stress, the not moving much at all, we will still have problems. Casey, which should we shop? Is Whole Foods the place to shop? The best possible place to shop is the farmer's market, 100%.
Whole Foods is great. We want to do organic. We spray 50 billion pounds of glyphosate, pesticides, all of our food each year.
It's basically toxin. We want to get the cleanest food possible from the best soil. There are 9,000 farmer's markets in the United States. It's going to be the best nutrients and we'll make you feel full because it's filled with nutrients. In those working class areas, put those farmer's markets. It'll help everybody.
Put the farmer's markets, whatever you can do, eat real food. Alright, whatever you do, pick up her book. Expand on it. Good Energy, The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health. Dr. Mies, thanks. Thanks, Brian.
