food-borne chemicals their popula- tions are routinely subjected to, and an entirely different standard for foods made for consumption in the United States. What most consumers don’t
realize: In Europe only about 400 chemicals, whose effects are carefully monitored, are allowed into the food supply. So when U.S. food manufac- turers produce food for sales abroad, they will actually modify the ingredi- ents, substituting natural alternatives for chemical additives so they pass muster with regulators abroad. But when they make and sell those
same foods in the United States, the number of chemicals, compounds, and dyes routinely added to your food supply now exceed over 10,000. “It’s the wild, wild West,” Hari
tells Newsmax. “And you see how our rates of chronic disease compare to other nations. It is insane that other countries are doing better than us in life expectancy, in obesity, in cancer, in diabetes — all of these things that we’re all facing. So this is really alarming.” Casey Means, M.D., with a Stan-
ford medical background, agrees. The additives and fructose in America’s ultra-processed, highly glycemic foods suppress the biological signal for sati- ety, she says, and put people on a roller coaster of glycemic highs and lows. She warns that ultra-processed
foods (UPFs) work chemically to block the messages that tell your body you’ve eaten enough. That leads people to eat more and more so the companies can sell more product. “The food industry isn’t trying to kill Americans,” her brother and coauthor Calley Means says. “They’re just trying to make food cheap and addictive.” Calley, a former Washington,
D.C., lobbyist, says it’s no accident the highly processed food industry was essentially a creation of the cigarette industry. “When the surgeon general, way
68 NEWSMAX | DECEMBER 2024
HARMFUL Vani Hari led a rally in October outside Kellogg’s office in Michigan protesting additives in cereals popular with children.
too late in the 1980s, said maybe ciga- rettes were maybe problematic,” he told Tucker Carlson, “these were some of the largest companies in the world with the largest cash piles in the world. So what they did was use their cash piles to buy food companies.” Then in the ’90s, explained Means, the tobacco giants “shifted their thou- sands of scientists who were experts at making cigarettes addictive to the food department. So we had the rise of ultra-processed food, to where our food now is a science experiment.” Those same corporations, he says,
also lobbied hard for the adoption of the food pyramid. As mind-boggling as it may seem in
an era of rampant metabolic dysfunc- tion, the foods that the original food pyramid told consumers to eat more than anything else were glycemic carbs — bread, cereal, rice, and pasta. Today, those often come in the form of UPFs, which now account for 63% of the average American’s diet. In her media appearances and on
her website, Casey Means identifies what she considers the root cause of Americans’ massive downhill slide into lifelong, chronic illness. She blames widespread metabolic dys- function at the cellular level, driven by glycemic, chemical-laden and fiber- less foods, further aggravated by living in a toxic environment. “The thing people need to un-
derstand,” she said, “is that all of these conditions are caused by the exact same thing, which is metabolic
dysfunction — this core, foundational issue of how our bodies function on a cellular level — which is driven by our toxic food system and our toxic environment.”
Among those threats, according to the journal Environmental Health: In 2016, over 322 million pounds of chemicals that are banned by the European Union were sprayed on U.S. agricultural lands. That’s because Big Ag relies on 72 pesticides that the EU considers too dangerous. Many researchers believe some of those chemicals are now present in the bloodstreams of virtually all Americans. In a 2016 study of preg- nant women in Indiana, for example, the controversial herbicide glyphosate was detected in 93% of urine samples tested. The combined effects of mul- tiple chemicals in the human blood- stream is largely unknown. “These subtle, insidious forces are
creating slow, progressive illness, start- ing now in fetal life, and allow patients to be profitable and on a pharma treadmill for life. They make us sick but don’t kill us — and then we are drugged for life,” Casey Means said. But that dystopian vision of human
lives being reduced to profit centers for mainstream medicine’s “sickcare” regime also contains a hidden seed of hope. For if a single cause lies at the root of the problem, the agenda for consumers, activists, and educators is clear. Can the rising MAHA movement
liberate the alphabet health agen- cies from their regulatory capture, persuade our medical institutions and medical schools to detoxify the food supply, and lead America to embrace preventive medicine in order to stave off chronic disease? That question will ultimately be
decided by voters. But what’s increas- ingly clear: The nation must embrace fundamental healthcare reforms for the dream of making America healthy again to ever come true.
HARI/FACEBOOK
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