I was once at a talk where a doctor said that everything that’s been done to food in the past 75 years has been done for TWO REASONS: to make food cheaper and to make the shelf life longer. That is absolutely true. Today we’re eating toxic ingredients disguised as good food. In addition, they’re making food ADDICTIVE, as Dr. Casey Means and Calley Means explain here.
Nothing stands in the way of industry profits, and the USDA and the FDA are willing participants.
2:05:25—2:10:15
Michelle Obama’s Weaponization of Sugar in Schools
Calley: This gets back to ultra processed food. So liquid sugar in the form of a Coke, you chug one Coke, that’s like the sugar of 15 oranges, the oranges have the fiber. So you couldn’t even physically eat all of the whole, unprocessed food, to get the sugar that’s weaponized in those sugary drinks and all the things we’re getting at Starbucks and all the things kids are drinking. Even juice, which Michelle Obama is now supporting as sugar water, literally.
She is now promoting sugar water for kids.
Casey: Because it’s ‘the better than soda option.’
Calley, But it’s still high in sugar.
Tucker: Why is she doing that?
Calley: Because she wants to make money.
Tucker: Oh, so she’s like a flack for some sugar company.
Calley: Oh, no. No, she partnered with a private equity company that specializes in junk food influencer partnerships.
Tucker: Actually?
Calley: Oh, yeah. They’re a private equity company that works on the Rock’s Energy Drink, and specialized in partnerships where high level influencers partner to promote junk food. And she is the chief spokesperson and co-founder of Plessey, which is a sugar water for kids.
Casey: It has less sugar than soda—
Calley: Because it’s a addictive. . . It’s sugar water.
Casey: Kids should be drinking water and milk.
Calley: It’s a safer cigarette.
What if Michelle Obama said that? What if Michelle Obama—
Casey: Stop drinking sugar water.
Calley: Kids shouldn’t be drinking sugar. Like the fact that the USDA and Michelle Obama can’t say that—
Michelle Obama was right in the first year talking about food, but she was directly bought off. She was directly influenced by the food companies. John Kerry, Teresa Hines, there was a lot of people that got to Michelle. This is well documented, and she shifted everything to exercise.
And the exercise group that she then partnered with was actually funded ultra-processed food companies. She shipped it all to exercise and totally stop talking about food.
Tucker: Anyone who’s ever tried to lose weight knows exercise is super important, it’s good for you, but you’re not going to lose it. . . .
Casey: The crazy thing about that Calley talked about, the soda and how it’s weaponize, I really want to drive that point home.
High fructose corn syrup, which is what’s in a lot of these drinks, was invented in the 1970s. This is a brand new substance. The invention of high fructose corn syrup, which is subsidized by the government throught commodity crop farm bill subsidies to corn. So it’s basically, we’re giving the soda companies this cheaper product, which is then turned into high fructose corn syrup.
Something interesting about fructose that we learned from bears who hibernate is that aside from other calories that you eat them and they cue satiety, with fructose, a very interesting molecule that’s found in berries. And when you have an animal who needs to go into hibernation, they need to pack on fat in their body. So before hibernation you have to load your body with fat.
So fructose aside from other calories, different than other calories, actually does not cue satiety. It cues the feed forward violence and aggression mechanism in that animal to basically outcompete all other animals to eat as many berries as possible in the fall to store fat, which is fructose, creates metabolic dysfunction, causes us to turn our sugar to fat, to basically store fat for winter.
So soda companies know all this. So they put this molecule in the sodas that you’re chugging, which is, like Calley, like 15 oranges. And the fructose you get in this, and it’s causing kids to be insatiably hungry, because essentially it’s telling their brains that winter is coming, pack on the fat. . . .
Whole foods are great. Anything that is a whole food that has not been broken down into its constituent parts and made into a ‘Frankenfood’ in a factory by a multinational corporation is a food I’m going to eat.
And the reason I choose organic or regenerative is because that berry—a berry just, in a grocery store that’s not organic, it going to have less nutrients in it than the berry in it than the berry you buy from a farm.
These foods contain anti-cancer compounds. They contain tens of thousands of molecules, literally medicine that changes our gene expression. This is nutrigenomics, but it all gets lost when you process the food.
Calley: It’s nothing short of gaslighting to convince us that these tons of food we eat are kind like fringe science, and these pills are the only thing that’s serious science. These truly are medicine.
I just say, Tucker, we get so confused, and this is a core point we try to drive home in the book, is that there is confusion by design.
There’s not an epidemic of people, I guarantee you, that are eating a 90 percent non-ultra processed food diet that have health epidemics.
I don’t care if you’re carnivore or vegan, because if you’re on that path of being curious for you and your family and taking that rebellion to actually cook and eat whole food, you’re going to adjust.
You’re going to look at your blood test and make sure, it’s different for everybody, but just as a public policy matter, as a spiritual matter in the country, we should be trying to engender awe and curiosity about what we’re putting in our bodies.
Very interesting. Thinking though that fructose is probably metabolized differently in hibernating animals compared to humans and other non hibernating animals, so the assertion that humans consuming fructose causes obesity is probably not accurate. Not talking about the highly processed, lab altered high fructose corn syrup, but natural fructose in whole food.