Podcasts about generally recognized

Story at-a-glance The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) allows U.S. food companies to use nearly 1,000 chemicals banned in Europe, many of which are linked to DNA damage, hormone disruption, or cancer Thanks to a legal loophole called “Generally Recognized as Safe” or GRAS, manufacturers are allowed to self-declare additives as safe without FDA approval, review, or even disclosure on the label Hidden additives are often disguised as “natural flavors” or “spices,” masking substances you'd never knowingly eat but are consuming regularly Ultraprocessed foods make up 73% of the U.S. food supply, designed with chemicals that increase cravings, damage gut health, and disrupt brain signaling Even after hospitalizations and deaths linked to hidden ingredients, the FDA rarely takes meaningful action — leaving your health in the hands of corporations

Story at-a-glance The FDA allows food manufacturers to introduce new additives without independent safety testing, meaning thousands of chemicals are in the U.S. food supply with little oversight Many food additives, including emulsifiers and preservatives, disrupt gut bacteria, leading to inflammation, metabolic disorders, and immune dysfunction The Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) loophole allows companies to self-certify chemicals as safe, even when long-term health effects are unknown Heavy metals like arsenic and lead are present in common foods due to weak enforcement standards, contributing to cognitive decline and increased disease risk Avoiding ultraprocessed foods, choosing organic when possible, and learning how to read ingredient labels will drastically reduce exposure to harmful additives

241: In today's episode, I'm joined by Dr. Peter McCullough, one of the most published cardiologists in his field, with over 700 published studies. If you followed me during COVID, you know I've been following his work closely as he provided crucial insights that went against the mainstream narrative—and as we now know, he was right. We talk about how to test for potential vaccine side effects, what to do if you're concerned, and Dr. McCullough's proven detox protocol. This episode is packed with science-based advice on long-term impacts, fertility concerns, and what to look for if you're dealing with any side effects.  Stay prepared with the Contagion Kit from The Wellness Company. Use code REALFOODOLOGY to save over $30 plus free shipping. Kits are for US residents only. www.twc.health/realfoodology     Topics Discussed:  What are the common side effects of the COVID vaccine, and how can you test for them? What is Dr. McCullough's detox protocol for addressing concerns related to the COVID vaccine? What are the long-term health impacts of the COVID vaccine, including risks like myocarditis and pericarditis? How might the COVID vaccine affect fertility, and what does the science say about these concerns? How can you test for and monitor spike proteins in the body following vaccination? How does natural immunity compare to vaccine-induced immunity, and what role does each play in overall health? Sponsored By:  Timeline | Timeline is offering 33% off your order of Mitopure while supplies last Go to timeline.com/REALFOODOLOGY33 and use code REALFOODOLOGY33 Our Place | Use code REALFOODOLOGY for 10% off at fromourplace.com Timestamps:  00:00:00 - Introduction 00:02:45 - Nutrition and Healthy Food Options 00:05:23 - Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) 00:08:40 - Dr. McCullough's Career 00:11:21 - Lack of COVID Protocols 00:12:45 - Natural Immunity 00:17:27 - COVID Risk Factors 00:19:31 - Nicotine and Spike Proteins 00:22:41 - Understanding Spike Proteins 00:24:26 - Long-Term Impact of the COVID Vaccine 00:29:17 - COVID Death Complications & Vaccine Program 00:33:08 - Long COVID and Vaccine Injury 00:36:57 - Preventing Blood Clots 00:38:12 - Testing for Spike Proteins 00:39:51 - Fertility, COVID, and Vaccines 00:45:21 - Pericarditis & Myocarditis 00:49:48 - Spike Protein Detox Protocol 00:55:46 - Monitoring Spike Proteins 00:58:35 - Blood Thinners and Detoxing 01:01:11 - Talking to Family About Vaccines 01:05:25 - “Antivaxers” 01:11:20 - Updated Spike Protein Research 01:14:59 - 60 Seconds on the Sick Care System Check Out The Wellness Company: Stay prepared with the Contagion Kit from The Wellness Company. Use code REALFOODOLOGY to save over $30 plus free shipping. Kits are for US residents only. www.twc.health/realfoodology     Focal Points The Courage to Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex (book) Check Out Courtney LEAVE US A VOICE MESSAGE Check Out My new FREE Grocery Guide! @realfoodology www.realfoodology.com My Immune Supplement by 2x4 Air Dr Air Purifier AquaTru Water Filter EWG Tap Water Database  Produced By: Drake Peterson

Episode transcript [Music] From Washington State University Extension, welcome to Food Safety in a Minute. From a food science perspective, ultra-processed foods are foods altered from their original form through processing, lacking a “legal” definition. Ultra-processed foods often include additives considered less healthy such as sugar, salt, colorings, flavorings, and less healthy fats; linked to chronic health conditions and obesity. Additives in ultra-processed food and their relationship to food safety and health are legitimate concerns. However, it's important to note that many additives in processed food come from the Food and Drug Administration's Generally Recognized as Safe or GRAS list. The usage of additives on this list is based on science and a long history of safe use. We'll talk about the GRAS list in an upcoming podcast. I'm Susie Craig. Thanks for listening. [Music] Resources: Carlos Augusto Monteiro, Cannon, G., Lawrence, M., Costa Louzada, M.L., and Pereira Machado, P. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Ultra-processed foods, diet quality, and health using the NOVA classification system. Rome, 2019. Accessed online 1/15/25. https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/5277b379-0acb-4d97-a6a3-602774104629/content. US Food and Drug Administration. Code of Federal Regulations. Part 170 – Food Additives. Accessed online 2/5/25. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-21/chapter-I/subchapter-B/part-170.

Food Travel USA with Elizabeth Dougherty ARE GLOBALISTS STILL CONTROLLING THE USDA The TRUTH About Food and Travel Original Broadcast Date: 03/15/2025 The USDA is under scrutiny as reports emerge that the agency is using globalist-backed data to assess the ongoing egg shortage, despite the current administration's supposed “America First” stance. Meanwhile, a long-overdue shake-up may be coming to the FDA's Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) list, with Bobby Kennedy leading the charge to revise regulations that haven't been updated in 66 years. These changes could have a massive impact on food safety and what makes its way onto store shelves. Elizabeth breaks down these critical food news stories, exposing the policies shaping the future of what Americans eat. FOOD TRAVEL USA FAST FACTS About the Show Using the chassis of a food and travel show, Elizabeth Dougherty has carved out her own lane in Talk Radio, covering the contamination of the food supply and the travel restrictions placed upon us by an overreaching government. The show also covers data protection, self-sufficiency and homesteading-related topics to help protect to us from this evil, corrupt system. With Elizabeth as the host, the show has a very different sound from the typical male-oriented talk radio. In combination with terrestrial stations that carry the show, we reach people who don't normally listen to politically-driven talk radio. In addition to the LIVE FEED of the show on Saturday afternoons from 5pm-7pm (eastern) / 2pm-4pm (pacific) we produce and distribute a dozen podcast / segments each week. Website & Social Media Website: FoodTravelUSA.com Social Media: Facebook | X (formerly Twitter) | Truth Social | YouTube Broadcast Details Live Broadcast: Saturday, 5 PM Listen Anytime Production Team Executive Producer: Michael Serio Email: FoodTravelUSA@proton.me Why Listeners Tune In ✔ The latest food & travel insights—every week ✔ Homemade videos of healthy, easy-to-make recipes ✔ No-holds-barred interviews on a LIVE, fast-paced, nationwide call-in show ✔ Elizabeth Dougherty: Writer, trained chef, world traveler, and award-winning talk show host ✔ First to bring expert insights on GMOs—before anyone else ✔ A true LIVE SHOW—NO “Best Of” reruns! ✔ Hard-hitting topics & interviews—no recycled political spin ✔ Engaged social media presence—200,000+ followers

Get the facts, without the spin. UNBIASED offers a clear, impartial recap of US news, including politics, elections, legal news, and more. Hosted by lawyer Jordan Berman, each episode provides a recap of current political events plus breakdowns of complex concepts—like constitutional rights, recent Supreme Court rulings, and new legislation—in an easy-to-understand way. No personal opinions, just the facts you need to stay informed on the daily news that matters. If you miss how journalism used to be, you're in the right place. In today's episode: Tariff War Update; Trump Threatens 200% Tariffs (1:22) Meta Whistleblower Files SEC Complaint and Releases Tell-All Memoir (7:01) HHS Secretary Kennedy Wants to Get Rid of Generally Recognized as Safe "Loophole" (11:53) DOJ Dismisses Federal Sexual Harassment Lawsuit Against Shelter for Unaccompanied Migrant Children; HHS Announces All Children Removed and All Shelters Closed (15:21) Washington State Sues Washington County Accusing Sheriffs Office of Assisting ICE Agents (20:45) USAID Sued After Acting Secretary Orders Employees to "Burn" and "Destroy" Documents (23:17) Mahmoud Khalil to Remain in Louisiana Facility At Least Until Friday (26:18) National Transportation Safety Board Issues "Urgent Recommendations" Following DC Crash (30:22) Trump Revokes Security Clearances for Law Firms (31:59) Quick Hitters: Inflation Cools, CDC Director Nomination Withdrawn, Trump Admin Takes Birthright Citizenship to Supreme Court, Astronauts Not Coming Home, Agencies Must Rehire Probationary Employees, Southwest Won't Allow Free Bags, All Migrants at Guantanamo Flown Back to US, EPA's Deregulatory Actions, Government Shutdown Looms (34:29) Critical Thinking Segment (39:20) SUBSCRIBE TO JORDAN'S FREE WEEKLY NEWSLETTER. Watch this episode on YouTube. Follow Jordan on Instagram and TikTok. All sources for this episode can be found here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this episode of Food Safety Matters, we discuss the top food safety stories of 2024 and their implications. We cover: The Boar's Head Listeria Outbreak [6:24] USDA Announces Immediate Changes to Listeria Rule, Inspections for RTE Food Facilities Following Deadly Listeria Outbreak, USDA Launches Internal Investigation Into How it Handled Boar's Head's Unsanitary Production Facility Congress Members Question USDA About Failure to Prevent Fatal Boar's Head Listeria Outbreak Boar's Head to Face Criminal Investigation Over Listeria Outbreak as Tenth Death is Reported  Following Outbreak, Boar's Head Forms Food Safety Council of Top Experts, Closes Facility, Discontinues Liverwurst Inspection Reports Show Mold, Insects, Meat Residues, and More at Boar's Head Facility Responsible for Listeria Outbreak Boar's Head RTE Deli Meats Recalled After Two Listeriosis Deaths It's Time to Reformulate Deli Meats to Reduce the Risk of Listeria monocytogenes—Feature story for Food Safety Magazine December ‘24/January '25, by Kathleen Glass, Ph.D., Wendy Bedale, Ph.D., and Daniel Unruh, Ph.D. The McDonald's/Taylor Farms E. coli Outbreak [18:53] FDA Closes Investigation of McDonald's E. Coli Outbreak Without Tests Confirming Onions as Source McDonald's E. coli Outbreak Grows to 104 Illnesses in 14 States; Testing Has Not Yet Found Outbreak Strain FDA Unable to Implicate Grower in E. coli Outbreak Linked to Taylor Farms Onions Served at McDonald's CDC Names Taylor Farms Onions as Cause of McDonald's E. coli Outbreak; Patient Count Rises to 90 Beef Ruled Out as Source of McDonald's E. coli Outbreak, Quarter Pounders Return to Restaurants Major Chains Pull Onions Due to E. coli Concerns After Taylor Farms Confirmed as McDonald's Supplier  At Least One Death Caused by E. coli Outbreak Linked to McDonald's Quarter Pounders  Food Safety Five Ep. 1: Fatal E. coli Outbreak Linked to Onions on McDonald's Quarter Pounders—Food Safety Five Newsreel video Grimmway Farms E. coli Outbreak [32:31] Grimmway Farms Carrot E. coli Outbreak Closed; No Match Found in Environmental Samples Canada Recalls Carrots Implicated in Fatal E. coli Outbreak Affecting U.S. Death Reported in E. coli Outbreak Linked to Nationally Distributed Organic Carrots  The Yu Shang Foods Listeria Outbreak [33:48] Another Infant Death Linked to Yu Shang Listeria Outbreak  Yu Shang Brand RTE Meats Cause Two-Year-Long Listeria Outbreak Resulting in Death of an Infant  Food Safety Technology Developments [36:37] How Rapid Development of Technology Has Revolutionized Food Safety—Food Safety Magazine on-demand webinar How is the Revolution in Technology Changing Food Safety?—“Food Safety Insights” column for Food Safety Magazine June/July '24, by Bob Ferguson How is the Revolution in Technology Changing Food Safety?—Part 2—“Food Safety Insights” column for Food Safety Magazine August/September '24, by Bob Ferguson How is the Revolution in Technology Changing Food Safety?—Part 3—“Food Safety Insights” column for Food Safety Magazine December ‘24/January '25, by Bob Ferguson  Listeria, Salmonella Represent 40 Percent of FDA Food and Beverage Recalls in Last 20 Years FDA Human Foods Program Restructuring [42:39] FDA Budget Constraints Lead to International Information-Sharing for Chemical Safety Reviews FDA Human Foods Program Reveals Work Plans for 2025 FDA Introduces Streamlined Complaint Process on First Day of New Human Foods Program FDA Outlines its Developing Systematic Post-Market Review Process for Chemicals in Food FDA Reorganization Officially Approved, Will be Implemented by October 1 Food Safety Five Ep. 2: How Budget Constraints May Influence FDA Food Chemical Safety Work—Food Safety Five Newsreel video Highly Pathogenic Avian Flu (HPAI) H5N1 and Dairy Foods [50:30] California Declares State of Emergency Over HPAI H5N1 Outbreak in Dairy Cows USDA Begins Five-Part National Milk Testing Strategy for HPAI H5N1 As Outbreak Rages On, USDA to Begin Field Trials for HPAI H5N1 Vaccine in Cattle USDA-FSIS to Begin Routine Monitoring for HPAI in Dairy Cows Under National Residue Program FDA Publishes Dairy Food Safety Research Agenda for HPAI H5N1 More Canadian Milk Testing, New Pasteurization Study Shows HPAI is Not Food Safety Risk USDA Finds HPAI in Muscle of Sick Dairy Cow; Study Shows Infectious Potential of Contaminated Raw Milk  USDA Experiments Show Cooking Beef Patties to “Well Done” Kills HPAI Virus USDA Testing Retail Ground Beef for HPAI H5N1; Maintains That U.S. Meat Supply is Safe FDA Testing Finds HPAI in Retail Milk Samples; Research Required to Determine Infectivity, Food Safety Risk USDA Now Requires HPAI Testing for Dairy Cattle, Mandatory Reporting USDA's Salmonella Framework for Raw Poultry Products [57:35] USDA-FSIS to Hold Two Public Meetings on Salmonella Framework for Raw Poultry in December USDA-FSIS Extends Comment Period for Proposed Salmonella Regulatory Framework Study Supports USDA's Serotype-Specific Regulatory Framework for Salmonella in Poultry USDA-FSIS Publishes Proposed Regulatory Framework for Salmonella in Raw Poultry  USDA-FSIS: Salmonella Officially an Adulterant in Breaded, Stuffed Raw Chicken Products at 1 CFU/g or Higher NACMCF Reports on Reducing Salmonella in Poultry, Advises FSIS on Proposed Regulatory Framework Esteban and Eskin: On the Frontlines of the Food Safety Fight Against Salmonella in Poultry—Food Safety Matters podcast FSMA 204/Food Traceability Rule Compliance [1:04:09] Leading Food Industry Associations Join Forces to Form FSMA 204 Collaboration  Public-Private, Sector-Neutral Partnership for Food Traceability Aims to Advance Industry Toward FSMA 204 Compliance  Report Highlights Industry Concerns With FSMA 204 Compliance, Barriers to Implementation World's Largest Food Distributor Sysco Unveils its FSMA 204 Traceability Plan Kroger's Traceability Policy Goes Beyond FSMA 204 by Including All Foods FDA Updates Human Foods Priorities; Releases FSMA 204, Foodservice Employee Health Resources Second Bill Introduced to Weaken FSMA 204; Safe Food Coalition Voices Opposition  Legislation Would Delay FSMA 204 Compliance Date, Ease Retailer Recordkeeping Requirements FSS '24: Regulatory, Industry Experts Share Best Practices Around FSMA 204 and Traceability Efforts Ep. 179. Dr. Takashi Nakamura: Ensuring Fresh Produce Safety From Field to Fork—Food Safety Matters Podcast  Better Food Traceability Can't Wait—Editorial piece by Frank Yiannas Legislation Targeting Food Additives and “Generally Recognized as Safe” (GRAS) Substances [1:13:13] FDA Could Decide Whether to Ban Red Dye 3 in Food ‘In the Next Few Weeks,' Officials Reveal in Senate Hearing  Congress Members Urge FDA to Ban Red Dye 3 in Food  FDA Budget Constraints Lead to International Information-Sharing for Chemical Safety Reviews  FDA Outlines its Developing Systematic Post-Market Review Process for Chemicals in Food BVO No Longer Authorized for Food Use by FDA The Evolving Landscape of Food Additives Regulation in the U.S., from the States to FDA California Bill Banning Some Artificial Colors in School Foods Advances, Awaits Signature Into Law  FDA Reviewing Safety of Food Chemicals of Concern, Like PFAS, BPA, Red Dye 3, and More  FDA Files Petitions to Rescind Approvals for Four Carcinogenic Food, Color Additives  ‘Toxic Free Food Act' Would Close FDA GRAS ‘Loophole' Allowing Potentially Toxic Additives in Food  Illinois Food Safety Act Banning Four Food Additives Passes State Senate, Amended to Include Manufacturers Pennsylvania is Latest State to Introduce Food Additives Legislation, While Kentucky Urges FDA to Take Control Missouri, Washington Introduce Bills to Ban Same Food Additives as California Food Safety Act Another Bill Introduced in New York to Expand State Regulation of Food Additives ‘Safe School Meals Act' Addresses Pesticides, PFAS, Food Dyes, and More in School Lunches Food Safety Five Ep. 2: How Budget Constraints May Influence FDA Food Chemical Safety Work—Food Safety Five Newsreel video  Ep. 162. Brian Sylvester: How the California Food Safety Act is Shaping U.S. Food Additives Regulation—Food Safety Matters Podcast Environmental and Chemical Contaminants [1:24:42] FDA Defends Revoking Authorizations for Most Phthalates; Remaining Uses Under Review High Levels of Toxic Plasticizers Phthalates, Bisphenols Found in Nearly All Foods in U.S.  EU Considering Bisphenol Ban in Food Packaging Based on Nontraditional Risk Assessment; Scientists Show Support  EU Moves Closer to Possible Ban on BPA in Food Contact Materials  USDA Testing for 2023 Shows 99 Percent of Foods Do Not Exceed Pesticide Residue Tolerances  EFSA: Pesticide Residues Below Legal Limits in More Than 96 Percent of EU Food Samples EPA Immediately Suspends Use of Herbicide Dacthal With Emergency Order EPA Cancels Agricultural Use of Harmful Pesticide Acephate  Pesticide Chlormequat is Being Detected More Frequently in Humans, EPA Poised to Allow its Use on Food Crops California Assembly Passes Bill Expediting Review of Herbicide Paraquat Center for Food Safety Petitions EPA to Ban PFAS in Pesticides, Pesticide Containers EWG Publishes 2024 Dirty Dozen List of Produce Most Contaminated With Pesticides  Kraft Heinz Voluntarily Pulls Lunchables from School Lunch Program Following Consumer Reports Petition  Baby Food Safety Act Would Give FDA Authority to Limit Toxic Heavy Metals in Food for Children  Maryland Introduces Bill to Require Toxic Heavy Metals Testing for Baby Foods, Disclosure of Results Recall Rethink: Food Recall Vulnerabilities Exposed by the Cinnamon Applesauce Incident—Cover story for Food Safety Magazine August/September '24, by Steven Mandernach, J.D. and Carrie Rigdon, Ph.D. We Want to Hear from You! Please send us your questions and suggestions to podcast@food-safety.com

There are dangers lurking in our food that affect your health and the health of our entire society, and you should know about them. In this episode, get the highlights from two recent Congressional events featuring expert testimony about the regulation of our food supply, as well as testimony from the man who is soon likely to be the most powerful person in our national health care system. Please Support Congressional Dish – Quick Links Contribute monthly or a lump sum via Support Congressional Dish via (donations per episode) Send Zelle payments to: Donation@congressionaldish.com Send Venmo payments to: @Jennifer-Briney Send Cash App payments to: $CongressionalDish or Donation@congressionaldish.com Use your bank's online bill pay function to mail contributions to: Please make checks payable to Congressional Dish Thank you for supporting truly independent media! Background Sources Joe Rogan Episodes The Joe Rogan Experience. The Joe Rogan Experience. The Joe Rogan Experience. The Joe Rogan Experience. Ron Johnson Scott Bauer. January 3, 2023. AP News. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Daniel Cusick. October 28, 2024. Politico. Rachel Treisman. August 5, 2024. NPR. Susanne Craig. May 8, 2024. The New York Times. Department of Health and Human Services U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. FDA “Generally Recognized as Safe” Approach Paulette M. Gaynor et al. April 2006. U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Paulette Gaynor and Sebastian Cianci. December 2005/January 2006. U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Glyphosate September 20, 2023. Phys.org. Lobbying and Conflicts of Interest OpenSecrets. OpenSecrets. OpenSecrets. LinkedIn. Shift from Democrats to Republicans Will Stone and Allison Aubrey. November 15, 2024. NPR. Helena Bottemiller Evich and Darren Samuelsohn. March 17, 2016. Politico. Audio Sources September 25, 2024 Roundtable discussion held by Senator Ron Johnson Participants: , Author, Good Energy; Tech entrepreneur, Levels , Co-founder, Truemed; Advocate, End Chronic Disease , aka the Food Babe, food activist Jillian Michaels, fitness expert, nutritionist, businesswoman, media personality, and author Dr. Chris Palmer, Founder and Director, Metabolic and Mental Health Program and Director, Department of Postgraduate and Continuing Education, McLean Hospital; Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School Brigham Buhler, Founder & CEO, Ways2Well Courtney Swan, nutritionist, real food activist, and founder of the popular platform "Realfoodology" , Founder and CEO, HumanCo; co-founder, Hu Kitchen Dr. Marty Makary, Chief of Islet Transplant Surgery, Professor of Surgery, and Public Policy Researcher, Johns Hopkins University Clips Robert F. Kennedy, Jr: When discussing improvements to US healthcare policy, politicians from both parties often say we have the best healthcare system in the world. That is a lie. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr: Every major pillar of the US healthcare system, as a statement of economic fact, makes money when Americans get sick. By far the most valuable asset in this country today is a sick child. The pharma industry, hospital industry, and medical school industry make more money when there are more interventions to perform on Americans, and by requiring insurance companies to take no more than 15% of premiums, Obamacare actually incentivized insurance companies to raise premiums to get 15% of a larger pie. This is why premiums have increased 100% since the passage of Obamacare, making health care the largest driver of inflation, while American life expectancy plummets. We spend four times per capita on health care than the Italians, but Italians live 7.5 years longer than us on average. And incidentally, Americans had the highest life expectancies in the world when I was growing up. Today, we've fallen an average of six years behind our European neighbors. Are we lazier and more suicidal than Italians? Or is there a problem with our system? Are there problems with our incentives? Are there problems with our food? 46:15 Robert F. Kennedy, Jr: So what's causing all of this suffering? I'll name two culprits, first and worst is ultra processed foods. 47:20 Robert F. Kennedy, Jr: The second culprit is toxic chemicals in our food, our medicine and our environment. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr: The good news is that we can change all this, and we can change it very, very, very quickly, and it starts with taking a sledgehammer to corruption, the conflicts in our regulatory agencies and in this building. These conflicts have transformed our regulatory agencies into predators against the American people and particularly our children. 80% of NIH grants go to people who have conflicts of interest, and these scientists are allowed to collect royalties of $150,000 a year on the products that they develop at NIH and then farm out to the pharmaceutical industry. The FDA, the USDA and CDC are all controlled by giant for-profit corporations. Their function is no longer to improve and protect the health of Americans. Their function is to advance the mercantile and commercial interests of the pharmaceutical industry that has transformed them and the food industry that has transformed them into sock puppets for the industry they're supposed to regulate. 75% of FDA funding does not come from taxpayers. It comes from pharma. And pharma executives and consultants and lobbyists cycle in and out of these agencies. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr: Money from the healthcare industry has compromised our regulatory agencies and this body as well. The reality is that many congressional healthcare staffers are worried about impressing their future bosses at pharmaceutical companies rather than doing the right thing for American children. Today, over 100 members of Congress support a bill to fund Ozempic with Medicare at $1,500 a month. Most of these members have taken money from the manufacturer of that product, a European company called Novo Nordisk. As everyone knows, once a drug is approved for Medicare, it goes to Medicaid, and there is a push to recommend Ozempic for Americans as young as six, over a condition, obesity, that is completely preventable and barely even existed 100 years ago. Since 74% of Americans are obese, the cost of all of them, if they take their Ozempic prescriptions, will be $3 trillion a year. This is a drug that has made Novo Nordisk the biggest company in Europe. It's a Danish company, but the Danish government does not recommend it. It recommends a change in diet to treat obesity and exercise. Virtually Novo Nordisk's entire value is based upon its projections of what Ozempic is going to sell to Americans. For half the price of Ozempic, we could purchase regeneratively raised organic agriculture, organic food for every American, three meals a day and a gym membership for every obese American. Why are members of Congress doing the bidding of this Danish company instead of standing up for American farmers and children? Robert F. Kennedy, Jr: For 19 years, solving the childhood chronic disease crisis has been the central goal of my life, and for 19 years, I have prayed to God every morning to put me in a position to end this calamity. I believe we have the opportunity for transformational, bipartisan change to transform American health, to hyper-charge our human capital, to improve our budget, and I believe, to save our spirits and our country. 1:23:10 Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI): Our next presenter, Dr. Marty Makary also bears a few scars from telling the truth during COVID. Dr. Makary is a surgeon and public policy researcher at Johns Hopkins University. He writes for The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, and is the author of two New York Times best selling books, Unaccountable and The Price We Pay. He's been an outspoken opponent of broad vaccine mandates and some COVID restrictions at schools. Dr. Makary holds degrees from Bucknell University, Thomas Jefferson University and Harvard University. Dr. Marty Makary: I'm trained in gastrointestinal surgery. My group at Johns Hopkins does more pancreatic cancer surgery than any hospital in the United States. But at no point in the last 20 years has anyone stopped to ask, why has pancreatic cancer doubled over those 20 years? Who's working on that? Who's looking into it? We are so busy in our health care system, billing and coding and paying each other, and every stakeholder has their gigantic lobby in Washington, DC, and everybody's making a lot of money, except for one stakeholder, the American citizen. They are financing this giant, expensive health care system through their paycheck deduction for health insurance and the Medicare excise tax as we go down this path, billing and coding and medicating. And can we be real for a second? We have poisoned our food supply, engineered highly addictive chemicals that we put into our food, we spray it with pesticides that kill pests. What do you think they do to our gut lining and our microbiome? And then they come in sick. The GI tract is reacting. It's not an acute inflammatory storm, it's a low grade chronic inflammation, and it makes people feel sick, and that inflammation permeates and drives so many of our chronic diseases that we didn't see half a century ago. Who's working on who's looking into this, who's talking about it? Our health care system is playing whack a mole on the back end, and we are not talking about the root causes of our chronic disease epidemic. We can't see the forest from the trees. Sometimes we're so busy in these short visits, billing and coding. We've done a terrible thing to doctors. We've told them, put your head down. Focus on billing and coding. We're going to measure you by your throughput and good job. You did a nice job. We have all these numbers to show for it. Well, the country is getting sicker. We cannot keep going down this path. We have the most over-medicated, sickest population in the world, and no one is talking about the root causes. Dr. Marty Makary: Somebody has got to speak up. Maybe we need to talk about school lunch programs, not just putting every kid on obesity drugs like Ozempic. Maybe we need to talk about treating diabetes with cooking classes, not just throwing insulin at everybody. Maybe we need to talk about environmental exposures that cause cancer, not just the chemo to treat it. We've got to talk about food as medicine. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI): So, Dr Makary, I've got a couple questions. First of all, how many years have you been practicing medicine? Dr. Marty Makary: 22 years. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI): So we've noticed a shift from decades ago when 80% of doctors are independent to now 80% are working for some hospital association. First of all, what has that meant in terms of doctors' independence and who they are really accountable too? Dr. Marty Makary: The move towards corporate medicine and mass consolidation that we've witnessed in our lifetime has meant more and more doctors are told to put their heads down, do your job: billing and coding short visits. We've not given doctors the time, research, or resources to deal with these chronic diseases. 1:32:45 Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI): Dr. Casey Means is a medical doctor, New York Times Best Selling Author, tech entrepreneur at Levels, an aspiring regenerative gardener and an outdoor enthusiast. While training as a surgeon, she saw how broken and exploitative the health care system is, and led to focus on how to keep people out of the operating room. And again, I would highly recommend everybody read Good Energy. It's a personal story, and you'll be glad you did. Dr. Casey Means: Over the last 50 years in the United States, we have seen rapidly rising rates of chronic illnesses throughout the entire body. The body and the brain, infertility, obesity, type 2 diabetes and pre-diabetes, Alzheimer's, dementia, cancer, heart disease, stroke, autoimmune disease, migraines, mental illness, chronic pain, fatigue, congenital abnormalities, chronic liver disease, autism, and infant and maternal mortality all going up. Americans live eight fewer years compared to people in Japan or Switzerland, and life expectancy is going down. I took an oath to do no harm, but listen to these stats. We're not only doing harm, we're flagrantly allowing harm. While it sounds grim, there is very good news. We know why all of these diseases are going up, and we know how to fix it. Every disease I mentioned is caused by or worsened by metabolic dysfunction, a word that it is thrilling to hear being used around this table. Metabolic dysfunction is a fundamental distortion of our cellular biology. It stops our cells from making energy appropriately. According to the American College of Cardiology, metabolic dysfunction now affects 93.2% of American adults. This is quite literally the cellular draining of our life force. This process is the result of three processes happening inside our cells, mitochondrial dysfunction, a process called oxidative stress, which is like a wildfire inside our cells, and chronic inflammation throughout the body and the gut, as we've heard about. Metabolic dysfunction is largely not a genetic issue. It's caused by toxic American ultra processed industrial food, toxic American chemicals, toxic American medications, and our toxic sedentary, indoor lifestyles. You would think that the American healthcare system and our government agencies would be clamoring to fix metabolic health and reduce American suffering and costs, but they're not. They are deafeningly silent about metabolic dysfunction and its known causes. It's not an overstatement to say that I learned virtually nothing at Stanford Medical School about the tens of thousands of scientific papers that elucidate these root causes of why American health is plummeting and how environmental factors are causing it. For instance, in medical school, I did not learn that for each additional serving of ultra processed food we eat, early mortality increases by 18%. This now makes up 67% of the foods our kids are eating. I took zero nutrition courses in medical school. I didn't learn that 82% of independently funded studies show harm from processed food, while 93% of industry sponsored studies reflect no harm. In medical school, I didn't learn that 95% of the people who created the recent USDA Food guidelines for America had significant conflicts of interest with the food industry. I did not learn that 1 billion pounds of synthetic pesticides are being sprayed on our food every single year. 99.99% of the farmland in the United States is sprayed with synthetic pesticides, many from China and Germany. And these invisible, tasteless chemicals are strongly linked to autism, ADHD, sex hormone disruption, thyroid disease, sperm dysfunction, Alzheimer's, dementia, birth defects, cancer, obesity, liver dysfunction, female infertility and more, all by hurting our metabolic health. I did not learn that the 8 billion tons of plastic that have been produced just in the last 100 years, plastic was only invented about 100 years ago, are being broken down into micro plastics that are now filling our food, our water, and we are now even inhaling them in our air. And that very recent research from just the past couple of months tells us that now about 0.5% of our brains by weight are now plastic. I didn't learn that there are more than 80,000 toxins that have entered our food, water, air and homes by industry, many of which are banned in Europe, and they are known to alter our gene expression, alter our microbiome composition and the lining of our gut, and disrupt our hormones. I didn't learn that heavy metals like aluminum and lead are present in our food, our baby formula, personal care products, our soil and many of the mandated medications, like vaccines and that these metals are neurotoxic and inflammatory. I didn't learn that the average American walks a paltry 3500 steps per day, even though we know based on science and top journals that walking, simply walking 7000 steps a day, slashes by 40-60% our risk of Alzheimer's, dementia, type two diabetes, cancer and obesity. I certainly did not learn that medical error and medications are the third leading cause of death in the United States. I didn't learn that just five nights of sleep deprivation can induce full blown pre-diabetes. I learned nothing about sleep, and we're getting about 20% less sleep on average than we were 100 years ago. I didn't learn that American children are getting less time outdoors now than a maximum security prisoner. And on average, adults spend 93% of their time indoors, even though we know from the science that separation from sunlight destroys our circadian biology, and circadian biology dictates our cellular biology. I didn't learn that professional organizations that we get our practice guidelines from, like the American Diabetes Association and American Academy of Pediatrics, have taken 10s of millions of dollars from Coke, Cadbury, processed food companies, and vaccine manufacturers like Moderna. I didn't learn that if we address these root causes that all lead to metabolic dysfunction and help patients change their food and lifestyle patterns with a united strong voice, we could reverse the chronic disease crisis in America, save millions of lives, and trillions of dollars in health care costs per year. Instead, doctors are learning that the body is 100 separate parts, and we learn how to drug, we learn how to cut and we learn how to bill. I'll close by saying that what we are dealing with here is so much more than a physical health crisis. This is a spiritual crisis we are choosing death over life. We are we are choosing death over life. We are choosing darkness over light for people and the planet, which are inextricably linked. We are choosing to erroneously believe that we are separate from nature and that we can continue to poison nature and then outsmart it. Our path out will be a renewed respect for the miracle of life and a renewed respect for nature. We can restore health to Americans rapidly with smart policy and courageous leadership. We need a return to courage. We need a return to common sense and intuition. We need a return to awe for the sheer miraculousness of our lives. We need all hands on deck. Thank you. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI): I'm not letting you off that easy. I've got a couple questions. So you outlined some basic facts that doctors should know that truthfully, you could cover in one hour of an introductory class in medical school, yes. So why aren't we teaching doctors these things? Dr. Casey Means: The easy thing to say would be, you know, follow the money. That sounds sort of trite, but frankly, I think that is the truth, but not in the way you might think that, like doctors are out to make money, or even medical schools. The money and the core incentive problem, which is that every institution that touches our health in America, from medical schools to pharmaceutical companies to health insurance companies to hospitals offices, they make more money when we are sick and less when we are healthy. That simple, one incentive problem corrodes every aspect of the way medicine is thought about. The way we think about the body, we talked about interconnectedness. It creates a system in which we silo the body into all these separate parts and create that illusion that we all buy into because it's profitable to send people to separate specialties. So it corrodes even the foundational conception of how we think about the body. So it is about incentives and money, but I would say that's the invisible hand. It's not necessarily affecting each doctor's clinical practice or the decision making. It's corroding every lever of the basics of how we even consider what the human body is and what life is. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI): In your book, you do a really good job of describing how, because of the specialization of medicine, you don't see the forest for the trees. The fact is, you do need specialized medicine. I mean, doctors can't know it all. So I think the question is, how do we get back to the reward for general practitioners that do focus on what you're writing about? Dr. Casey Means: I have huge respect for doctors, and I am incredibly grateful for the American health care system, which has produced miracles, and we absolutely need continue to have primary care doctors and specialists, and they should be rewarded highly. However, if we focused on what everyone here is talking about, I think we'd have 90% less throughput through our health care system. We would be able to have these doctors probably have a much better life to be honest. You know, because right now, doctors are working 100 hours a week seeing 50, 60, 70 patients, and could actually have more time with patients who develop these acute issues that need to be treated by a doctor. But so many of the things in the specialist office are chronic conditions that we know are fundamentally rooted in the cellular dysfunction I describe, which is metabolic dysfunction, which is created by our lifestyle. So I think that there's always going to be a place for specialists, but so so many, so much fewer. And I think if we had a different conception for the body is interconnected, they would also interact with each other in a very different way, a much more collaborative way. And then, of course, we need to incentivize doctors in the healthcare system towards outcomes, not throughput. 1:46:25 Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI): Our next presenter is Dr. Chris Palmer. Dr. Palmer is a Harvard trained psychiatrist, researcher and author of Brain Energy, where he explores a groundbreaking connection between metabolic health and mental illness. He is a leader in innovative approaches to treating psychiatric conditions, advocating for the use of diet and metabolic interventions to improve mental health outcomes. Dr. Palmer's work is reshaping how the medical field views and treats mental health disorders. Dr. Chris Palmer: I want to build on what Dr. Means just shared that these chronic diseases we face today. Obesity, diabetes, fatty liver, all share something in common. They are, in fact, metabolic dysfunction. I'm going to go into a little bit of the science, just to make sure we're all on the same page. Although most people think of metabolism as burning calories, it is far more than that. Metabolism is a series of chemical reactions that convert food into energy and building blocks essential for cellular health. When we have metabolic dysfunction, it can drive numerous chronic diseases, which is a paradigm shift in the medical field. Now there is no doubt metabolism is complicated. It really is. It is influenced by biological, psychological, environmental and social factors, and the medical field says this complexity is the reason we can't solve the obesity epidemic because they're still trying to understand every molecular detail of biology. But in fact, we don't need to understand biology in order to understand the cause. The cause is coming from our environment, a toxic environment like poor diet and exposure to harmful chemicals, and these are actually quite easy to study, understand, and address. There is no doubt food plays a key role. It provides the substrate for energy and building blocks. Nutritious foods support metabolism, while ultra processed options can disrupt it. It is shocking that today, in 2024, the FDA allows food manufacturers to introduce brand new chemicals into our food supply without adequate testing. The manufacturer is allowed to determine for themselves whether this substance is safe for you and your family to eat or not. Metabolism's impact goes beyond physical health. I am a psychiatrist. Some of you are probably wondering, why are you here? It also affects mental health. Because guess what? The human brain is an organ too, and when brain metabolism is impaired, it can cause symptoms that we call mental illness. It is no coincidence that as the rates of obesity and diabetes are skyrocketing, so too are the rates of mental illness. In case you didn't know, we have a mental health crisis. We have all time prevalence highs for depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, deaths of despair, drug overdoses, ADHD and autism. What does the mental health field have to say for this? Well, you know, mental illness is just chemical imbalances, or maybe trauma and stress that is wholly insufficient to explain the epidemic that we are seeing. And in fact, there is a better way to integrate the biopsychosocial factors known to play a role in mental illness. Mental Disorders at their core are often metabolic disorders impacting the brain. It's not surprising to most people that obesity and diabetes might play a role in depression or anxiety, but the rates of autism have quadrupled in just 20 years, and the rates of ADHD have tripled over that same period of time. These are neuro developmental disorders, and many people are struggling to understand, how on earth could they rise so rapidly? But it turns out that metabolism plays a profound role in neurodevelopment, and sure enough, parents with metabolic issues like obesity and diabetes are more likely to have children with autism and ADHD. This is not about fat shaming, because what I am arguing is that the same foods and chemicals and other drivers of obesity that are causing obesity in the parents are affecting the brain health of our children. There is compelling evidence that food plays a direct role in mental health. One study of nearly 300,000 people found that those who eat ultra processed foods daily are three times more likely to struggle with their mental health than people who never or rarely consume them. A systematic review found direct associations between ultra processed food exposure and 32 different health parameters, including mental mental health conditions. Now I'm not here to say that food is the only, or even primary driver of mental illness. Let's go back to something familiar. Trauma and stress do drive mental illness, but for those of you who don't know, trauma and stress are also associated with increased rates of obesity and diabetes. Trauma and stress change human metabolism. We need to put the science together. This brings me to a key point. We cannot separate physical and mental health from metabolic health. Addressing metabolic dysfunction has the potential to prevent and treat a wide range of chronic diseases. Dr. Chris Palmer: In my own work, I have seen firsthand how using metabolic therapies like the ketogenic diet and other dietary interventions can improve even severe mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, sometimes putting them into lasting remission. These reports are published in peer reviewed, prestigious medical journals. However, there is a larger issue at play that many have talked about, medical education and public health recommendations are really captured by industry and politics, and at best, they often rely on weak epidemiological data, resulting in conflicting or even harmful advice. We heard a reference to this, but in case you didn't know, a long time ago, we demonized saturated fat. And what was the consequence of demonizing saturated fat? We replaced it with "healthy vegetable shortening." That was the phrase we used, "healthy vegetable shortening." Guess what was in that healthy vegetable shortening? It was filled with trans fats, which are now recognized to be so harmful that they've been banned in the United States. Let's not repeat mistakes like this. Dr. Chris Palmer: So what's the problem? Number one, nutrition and mental health research are severely underfunded, with each of them getting less than 5% of the NIH budget. This is no accident. This is the concerted effort of lobbying by industry, food manufacturers, the healthcare industry, they do not want root causes discovered. We need to get back to funding research on the root causes of mental and metabolic disorders, including the effects of foods, chemicals, medications, environmental toxins, on the human brain and metabolism. Dr. Chris Palmer: The issue of micro plastics and nano plastics in the human body is actually, sadly, in its infancy. We have two publications out in the last couple of months demonstrating that micro plastics are, in fact, found in the human brain. And as Dr. Means said, and you recited, 0.5% of the body weight, or the brain's weight, appears to be composed of micro plastics. We need more research to better understand whether these micro plastics are, in fact, associated with harmful conditions, because microplastics are now ubiquitous. So some will argue, well, they're everywhere, and everybody's got them, and it's just a benign thing. Some will argue that the most compelling evidence against that is a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine a few months ago now, in which they were doing routine carotid endarterectomies, taking plaque out of people's carotid arteries. Just routinely doing that for clinical care, and then they analyzed those plaques for micro plastics. 58% of the people had detectable micro plastics in the plaques. So they compared this 58% group who had micro plastics to the ones who didn't, followed them for three years, just three years, and the ones who had micro plastics had four times the mortality. There is strong reason to believe, based on animal data and based on cell biology data, that microplastics are in fact, toxic to the human body, to mitochondrial function, to hormone dysregulation and all sorts of things. There are lots of reasons to believe that, but the scientists will say, we need more research. We need to better understand whether these micro plastics really are associated with higher rates of disease. I think people are terrified of the answer. People are terrified of the answer. And if you think about everything that you consume, and how much of it is not wrapped in plastic, all of those industries are going to oppose research. They are going to oppose research funding to figure this out ASAP, because that will be a monumental change to not just the food industry but our entire economy. Imagining just cleaning up the oceans and trying to get this plastic and then, more importantly, trying to figure out, how are we going to detox humans? How are we going to de-plasticize human beings? How are we going to get these things out? It is an enormous problem, but the reality is, putting our heads in the sand is not going to help. And I am really hopeful that by raising issues and letting people know about this health crisis, that maybe we will get answers quickly. Dr. Chris Palmer: Your question is, why are our health agencies not exploring these questions? It's because the health agencies are largely influenced by the industries they are supposed to be regulating and looking out for. The medical education community is largely controlled by pharmaceutical companies. One and a half billion dollars every year goes to support physician education. That's from pharmaceutical companies. One and a half billion from pharmaceutical companies. So physicians are getting educated with some influence, large influence, I would argue, by them, the health organizations. It's a political issue. The NIH, it's politics. Politicians are selecting people to be on the committees or people to oversee these organizations. Politicians rely on donations from companies and supporters to get re-elected, and the reality is this is not going to be easy to tackle. The challenge is that you'll get ethical politicians who say, I'm not going to take any of that money, and I'm going to try to do the right thing and right now, the way the system is set up, there's a good chance those politicians won't get re-elected, and instead, their opponents, who were more than happy to take millions of dollars in campaign contributions, will get re-elected, and then they will return the favor to their noble campaign donors. We are at a crossroads. We have to decide who are the constituents of the American government. Is it industry, or is it the American people? 2:09:35 Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI): Calley Means the co-founder of Truemed, a company that enables tax free spending on food and exercise. He recently started an advocacy coalition with leading health and wellness companies called End Chronic Disease. Early in his career, he was a consultant for food and pharma companies. He is now exposing practices they used to weaponize our institutions of trust, and he's doing a great job doing interviews with his sister, Casey. Calley Means: If you think about a medical miracle, it's almost certainly a solution that was invented before 1960 for an acute condition: emergency surgical procedures to ensure a complicated childbirth wasn't a death sentence, sanitation procedures, antibiotics that insured infection was an inconvenience, not deadly, eradicating polio, regular waste management procedures that helped control outbreaks like the bubonic plague, sewage systems that replaced the cesspools and opened drains, preventing human waste from contaminating the water. The US health system is a miracle in solving acute conditions that will kill us right away. But economically, acute conditions aren't great in our modern system, because the patient is quickly cured and is no longer a customer. Start in the 1960s the medical system took the trust engendered by these acute innovations like antibiotics, which were credited with winning World War Two, and they used that trust to ask patients not to question its authority on chronic diseases, which can last a lifetime and are more profitable. But the medicalization of chronic disease in the past 50 years has been an abject failure. Today, we're in a siloed system where there's a treatment for everything. And let's just look at the stats. Heart disease has gone up as more statins are prescribed. Type 2 diabetes has gone up as more Metformin is prescribed. ADHD has gone up as more Adderall is prescribed. Depression and suicide has gone up as more SSRIs are prescribed. Pain has gone up as more opioids are prescribed. Cancer has gone up as we've spent more on cancer. And now JP Morgan literally at the conference in San Francisco, recently, they put up a graph, and they showed us more Ozempic is projected to be prescribed over the next 10 years, obesity rates are going to go up as more is prescribed. Explain that to me. There was clapping. All the bankers were clapping like seals at this graphic. Our intervention based system is by design. In the early 1900s, John D. Rockefeller using that he could use byproducts from oil production to create pharmaceuticals, heavily funded medical schools throughout the United States to teach a curriculum based on the intervention-first model of Dr. William Stewart Halsted, the founding physician of Johns Hopkins, who created the residency-based model that viewed invasive surgical procedures and medication as the highest echelon of medicine. An employee of Rockefeller's was tasked to create the Flexner Report, which outlined a vision for medical education that prioritized interventions and stigmatized nutritional and holistic remedies. Congress affirmed the Flexner Report in 1910 to establish that any credentialed medical institution in the United States had to follow the Halsted-Rockefeller intervention based model that silos disease and downplay viewing the body as an interconnected system. It later came out that Dr. Halsted's cocaine and morphine addiction fueled his day long surgical residencies and most of the medical logic underlying the Flexner Report was wrong. But that hasn't prevented the report and the Halsted-Rockefeller engine based brand of medicine from being the foundational document that Congress uses to regulate medical education today. Calley Means: Our processed food industry was created by the cigarette industry. In the 1980s, after decades of inaction, the Surgeon General and the US government finally, finally said that smoking might be harmful, and smoking rates plummeted. We listened to doctors in this country. We listened to medical leadership, and as smoking rates plummeted, cigarette companies, with their big balance sheets, strategically bought up food companies, and by 1990 the two largest food companies in the world were Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds, two cigarette companies. These cigarette companies moved two departments over from the cigarette department to the food department. They moved the scientists. Cigarette companies were the highest payers of scientists, one of the biggest employers of scientists to make the cigarettes addictive. They moved these addiction specialists, world leading addiction specialists, to the food department by the thousands. And those scientists weaponized our ultra processed food. That is the problem with ultra processed food. You have the best scientists in the world creating this food to be palatable and to be addictive. They then moved their lobbyists over. They used the same playbook, and their lobbyists co-opted the USDA and created the food pyramid. The Food Pyramid was a document created by the cigarette industry through complete corporate capture, and was an ultra processed food marketing document saying that we needed a bunch of carbs and sugar. And we listened to medical experts in this country, the American people, American parents. Many parents who had kids in the 90s thought it was a good thing to do to give their kids a bunch of ultra processed foods and carb consumption went up 20% in the American diet in the next 10 years. The Devil's bargain comes in in that this ultra processed food consumption has been one of the most profitable dynamics in American history for the health care industry. As we've all just been decimated with chronic conditions, the medical industry hasn't. Not only have they been silent on this issue, they've actually been complicit, working for the food industry. I helped funnel money from Coca Cola to the American Diabetes Association. Yeah. 2:31:40 Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI): Next presenter will be Brigham Buhler. Brigham is the Founder and CEO of Ways2Well, a healthcare company that provides personalized preventive care through telemedicine, with a strong background in the pharmaceutical industry. Brigham is focused on making healthcare more accessible by harnessing the power of technology, delivering effective and tailored treatments. His vision for improving health outcomes has positioned him as a leader in modern patient centered healthcare solutions. Brigham Buhler: We hear people reference President Eisenhower's speech all the time about the military industrial complex, but rarely do we hear the second half of that speech. He also warned us about the rise of the scientific industrial complex. He warned us, if we allow the elite to control the scientific research, it could have dire consequences. 2:36:30 Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI): I'm going to call an audible here as moderator, I saw that hopefully the future chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Senator Mike Crapo from Idaho, came into the room. I asked Mike to share his story. He used to wear larger suits, let's put it that way. But he went down the path of the ketogenic diet, I believe. But Mike, why don't you tell your story? And by the way, he's somebody you want to influence. Chairman of Senate Finance Committee makes an awful lot of decisions on Medicare, Medicaid, a lot of things we talked about with Ozempic, now the lobbying group try and make that available, and how harmful, I think, most people in this room think that might be so. Senator Crapo, if you could just kind of tell us your story in terms of your diet change and what results you had. Sen. Mike Crapo (R-ID): Well, first of all, let me thank you. I didn't come here to say anything. I came here to listen, but I appreciate the opportunity to just have a second to tell you my personal story. I'll say before I do that, thank you for Ron Johnson. Senator Johnson is also a member of the Finance Committee, and it is my hope that we can get that committee, which I think has the most powerful jurisdiction, particularly over these areas, of any in the United States Congress, and so I'm hopeful we can get a focus on addressing the government's part of the role in this to get us back on a better track. 2:54:35 Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI): Vani Hari, known as the Food Babe -- they wrote that for me, that wasn't me, that's my not my nickname -- is a food activist, author and speaker committed to improving food quality and safety. She has built a powerful platform through her blog advocating for transparency in food labeling and the removal of harmful chemicals from processed food. Her activism has spurred significant change in the food industry, encouraging consumers to make healthier, more informed choices, while prompting companies to adopt cleaner practices. Vani Hari: Our government is letting US food companies get away with serving American citizens harmful ingredients that are banned or heavily regulated in other countries. Even worse, American food companies are selling the same exact products overseas without these chemicals, but choose to continue serving us the most toxic version here. It's un-American. One set of ingredients there, and one set of ingredients here. Let me give you some examples. This is McDonald's french fries. I would like to argue that probably nobody in this room has not had a McDonald's french fry, by the way, nobody raised their hand during the staff meeting earlier today. In the US, there's 11 ingredients. In the UK, there's three, and salt is optional. An ingredient called dimethyl polysiloxane is an ingredient preserved with formaldehyde, a neurotoxin, in the US version. This is used as a foaming agent, so they don't have to replace the oil that often, making McDonald's more money here in the United States, but they don't do that across the pond. Here we go, this is Skittles. Notice the long list of ingredient differences, 10 artificial dyes in the US version and titanium dioxide. This ingredient is banned in Europe because it can cause DNA damage. Artificial dyes are made from petroleum, and products containing these dyes require a warning label in Europe that states it may cause adverse effects on activity and attention in children, and they have been linked to cancer and disruptions in the immune system. This on the screen back here, is Gatorade. In the US, they use red 40 and caramel color. In Germany, they don't, they use carrot and sweet potatoes to color their Gatorade. This is Doritos. The US version has three different three different artificial dyes and MSG, the UK version does not and let's look at cereal. General Mills is definitely playing some tricks on us. They launched a new version of Trix just recently in Australia. It has no dyes, they even advertise that, when the US version still does. This is why I became a food activist. My name is Vani Hari, and I only want one thing. I want Americans to be treated the same way as citizens in other countries by our own American companies. Vani Hari: We use over 10,000 food additives here in the United States and in Europe, there's only 400 approved. In 2013, I discovered that Kraft was producing their famous mac and cheese in other countries without artificial dyes. They used Yellow 5 and Yellow 6 here. I was so outraged by this unethical practice that I decided to do something about it. I launched a petition asking Kraft to remove artificial dyes from their products here in the United States, and after 400,000 signatures and a trip to their headquarters, Kraft finally announced they would make the change. I also discovered Subway was selling sandwiches with a chemical called azodicarbonamide in their bread in other countries. This is the same chemical they use in yoga mats and shoe rubber. You know, when you turn a yoga mat sideways and you see the evenly dispersed air bubbles? Well, they wanted to do the same thing in bread, so it would be the same exact product every time you went to a Subway. When the chemical is heated, studies show that it turns into a carcinogen. Not only is this ingredient banned in Europe and Australia, you get fined $450,000 if you get caught using it in Singapore. What's really interesting is when this chemical is heated, studies show that it turns into a carcinogen. Not only is this ingredient banned, but we were able to get Subway to remove azodicarbonamide from their bread in the United States after another successful petition. And as a bonus, there was a ripple effect in almost every bread manufacturer in America followed suit. For years, Starbucks didn't publish their ingredients for their coffee drinks. It was a mystery until I convinced a barista to show me the ingredients on the back of the bottles they were using to make menu items like their famous pumpkin spice lattes. I found out here in the United States, Starbucks was coloring their PSLs with caramel coloring level four, an ingredient made from ammonia and linked to cancer, but using beta carotene from carrots to color their drinks in the UK. After publishing an investigation and widespread media attention, Starbucks removed caramel coloring from all of their drinks in America and started publishing the ingredients for their entire menu. I want to make an important point here. Ordinary people who rallied for safer food shared this information and signed petitions. Were able to make these changes. We did this on our own. But isn't this something that the people in Washington, our elected politicians, should be doing? Vani Hari: Asking companies to remove artificial food dye would make an immediate impact. They don't need to reinvent the wheel. They already have the formulations. As I've shown you, consumption of artificial food dyes has increased by 500% in the last 50 years, and children are the biggest consumers. Yes, those children. Perfect timing. 43% of products marketed towards children in the grocery store contain artificial dyes. Food companies have found in focus groups, children will eat more of their product with an artificial dye because it's more attractive and appealing. And the worst part, American food companies know the harms of these additives because they were forced to remove them overseas due to stricter regulations and to avoid warning labels that would hurt sales. This is one of the most hypocritical policies of food companies, and somebody needs to hold them accountable. Vani Hari: When Michael Taylor was the Deputy Commissioner of the of the FDA, he said, he admitted on NPR, we don't have the resources, we don't have the capabilities to actually regulate food chemicals, because we don't have the staff. There's no one there. We are under this assumption, and I think a lot of Americans are under this assumption, that every single food additive ingredient that you buy at the grocery store has been approved by some regulatory body. It hasn't. It's been approved by the food companies themselves. There's 1000s of chemicals where the food company creates it, submits the safety data, and then the FDA rubber stamps it, because they don't have any other option. 3:09:15 Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI): So our next presenter is Jason Karp. Jason is the founder and CEO of HumanCo, a mission driven company that invests in and builds brands focused on healthier living and sustainability. In addition to HumanCo, Jason is the co-founder of Hu Kitchen, known for creating the number one premium organic chocolate in the US. My wife will appreciate that. Prior to HumanCo, Jason spent over 21 years in the hedge fund industry, where he was the founder and CEO of an investment fund that managed over $4 billion. Jason graduated summa cum laude from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. 3:11:10 Jason Karp: I've been a professional investor for 26 years, dealing with big food companies, seeing what happens in their boardrooms, and why we now have so much ultra processed food. Jason Karp: Having studied the evolution of corporations, I believe the root cause of how we got here is an unintended consequence of the unchecked and misguided industrialization of agriculture and food. I believe there are two key drivers behind how we got here. First, America has much looser regulatory approach to approving new ingredients and chemicals than comparable developed countries. Europe, for example, uses a guilty until proven innocent standard for the approval of new chemicals, which mandates that if an ingredient might pose a potential health risk, it should be restricted or banned for up to 10 years until it is proven safe. In complete contrast, our FDA uses an innocent until proven guilty approach for new chemicals or ingredients that's known as GRAS, or Generally Recognized as Safe. This recklessly allows new chemicals into our food system until they are proven harmful. Shockingly, US food companies can use their own independent experts to bring forth a new chemical without the approval of the FDA. It is a travesty that the majority of Americans don't even know they are constantly exposed to 1000s of untested ingredients that are actually banned or regulated in other countries. To put it bluntly, for the last 50 years, we have been running the largest uncontrolled science experiment ever done on humanity without their consent. Jason Karp: And the proof is in the pudding. Our health differences compared to those countries who use stricter standards are overwhelmingly conclusive. When looking at millions of people over decades, on average, Europeans live around five years longer, have less than half our obesity rates, have significantly lower chronic disease, have markedly better mental health, and they spend as little as 1/3 on health care per person as we do in this country. While lobbyists and big food companies may say we cannot trust the standards of these other countries because it over regulates, it stifles innovation, and it bans new chemicals prematurely, I would like to point out that we trust many of these other countries enough to have nuclear weapons. These other countries have demonstrated it is indeed possible to not only have thriving companies, but also prioritize the health of its citizens with a clear do no harm approach towards anything that humans put in or on our bodies. Jason Karp: The second driver, how we got here, is all about incentives. US industrial food companies have been myopically incentivized to reward profit growth, yet bear none of the social costs of poisoning our people and our land. Since the 1960s, America has seen the greatest technology and innovation boom in history. As big food created some of the largest companies in the world, so too did their desire for scaled efficiency. Companies had noble goals of making the food safer, more shelf stable, cheaper and more accessible. However, they also figured out how to encourage more consumption by making food more artificially appealing with brighter colors and engineered taste and texture. This is the genesis of ultra processed food. Because of these misguided regulatory standards, American companies have been highly skilled at maximizing profits without bearing the societal costs. They have replaced natural ingredients with chemicals. They have commodified animals into industrial widgets, and they treat our God given planet as an inexhaustible, abusable resource. Sick Americans are learning the hard way that food and agriculture should not be scaled in the same ways as iPhones. 3:16:50 Jason Karp: They use more chemicals in the US version, because it is more profitable and because we allow them to do so. Jason Karp: Artificial food dyes are cheaper and they are brighter. And the reason that I chose to use artificial food dyes in my public activist letter is because there's basically no counter argument. Many of the things discussed today, I think there is a nuanced debate, but with artificial food dyes, they have shown all over the world that they can use colorants that come from fruit. This is the Canadian version. This is the brightness of the Canadian version, just for visibility, and this is the brightness of artificial food dyes. So of course, Kellogg and other food companies will argue children prefer this over this, just as they would prefer cocaine over sugar. That doesn't make it okay. Calley Means: Senator, can I just say one thing? As Jason and Vani were talking, it brought me back to working for the food industry. We used to pay conservative lobbyists to go to every office and say that it was the "nanny state" to regulate food. And I think that's, as a conservative myself, something that's resonated. I just cannot stress enough that, as we're hopefully learned today, the food industry has rigged our systems beyond recognition. And addressing a rigged market is not an attack on the free market. Is a necessity for a free market to take this corruption out. So I just want to say that. 3:21:00 Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI): Our next presenter is Jillian Michaels. Ms. Michaels is a globally recognized fitness expert, entrepreneur, and best selling author. With her no nonsense approach to health, she's inspired millions through her fitness programs, books and digital platforms, best known for her role on The Biggest Loser, Michaels promotes a balanced approach to fitness and nutrition and emphasizing long term health and self improvement. Jillian Michaels: The default human condition in the 21st century is obese by design. Specific, traceable forms of what's referred to as structural violence are created by the catastrophic quartet of big farming, big food, Big Pharma, and big insurance. They systematically corrupt every institution of trust, which has led to the global spread of obesity and disease. Dysfunctional and destructive agricultural legislation like the Farm Bill, which favors high yield, genetically engineered crops like corn and soy, leading to the proliferation of empty calories, saturated with all of these toxins that we've been talking about today for three hours, it seems like we can never say enough about it, and then this glut of cheap calories provides a boon to the food industry giants. They just turn it into a bounty of ultra processed, factory-assembled foods and beverages strategically engineered to undermine your society and foster your dependence, like nicotine and cocaine, so we literally cannot eat just one. And to ensure that you don't, added measures are taken to inundate our physical surroundings. We're literally flooded with food, and we are brainwashed by ubiquitous cues to eat, whether it's the Taco Bell advertisement on the side of a bus as you drive to work with a vending machine at your kids school, there is no place we spend time that's left untouched. They're omnipresent. They commandeer the narrative, with 30 billion worth of advertising dollars, commercials marketed to kids, with mega celebrities eating McDonald's and loving it, sponsored dietitians paid to promote junk food on social media, utilizing anti-diet body positivity messaging like, "derail the shame" in relation to fast food consumption, Time Magazine brazenly issuing a defense of ultra processed foods on their cover with the title, "What if altra processed foods aren't as bad as you think?" And when people like us try to sound the alarm, they ensure that we are swiftly labeled as anti-science, fat shamers, and even racists. They launch aggressive lobbying efforts to influence you. Our politicians to shape policy, secure federal grants, tax credits, subsidy dollars, which proliferates their product and heavily pads their bottom line. They have created a perfect storm in which pharmaceuticals that cost hundreds, if not 1000s per month, like Ozempic, that are linked to stomach paralysis, pancreatitis and thyroid cancer, can actually surge. This reinforces a growing dependence on medical interventions to manage weight in a society where systemic change in food production and consumption is desperately needed and also very possible. These monster corporations have mastered the art of distorting the research, influencing the policy, buying the narrative, engineering the environment, and manipulating consumer behavior. Jillian Michaels: While I have been fortunate enough to pull many back from the edge over the course of my 30 year career, I have lost just as many, if not more, than I have saved. I have watched them slip through my fingers, mothers that orphan their children, husbands that widow their wives. I have even watched parents forced to suffer the unthinkable loss of their adult children. There are not words to express the sadness I have felt and the fury knowing that they were literally sacrificed at the altar of unchecked corporate greed. Most Americans are simply too financially strained, psychologically drained and physically addicted to break free without a systemic intervention. Attempting to combat the status quo and the powers that be is beyond swimming upstream. It is like trying to push a rampaging river that's infested with piranhas. After years of trying to turn the tide, I submit that the powers that be are simply too powerful for us to take on alone. I implore the people here that shape the policy to take a stand. The buck must stop with you, while the American people tend to the business of raising children and participating in the workforce to ensure that the wheels of our country go around. They tapped you to stand watch. They tapped you to stand guard. We must hold these bad actors accountable. And I presume the testimonials you heard today moved you. Digest them, discuss them, and act upon them, because if this current trend is allowed to persist, the stakes will be untenable. We are in the middle of an extinction level event. The American people need help. They need heroes. And people of Washington, your constituents chose you to be their champion. Please be the change. Thank you. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI): There was one particular piece of legislation or one thing that we could do here in Washington, what would it be? Jillian Michaels: Get rid of Citizens United and get the money out of politics. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI): Okay. 3:37:00 Calley Means: To the healthcare staffers slithering behind your bosses, working to impress your future bosses at the pharmaceutical companies, the hospitals, the insurance companies, many of them are in this building, and we are coming for you. 3:37:25 Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI): Next up is Ms. Courtney Swan. Ms. Swan is a nutritionist, real food activist, and founder of the popular platform, Realfoodology. She advocates for transparency in the food industry, promoting the importance of whole foods and clean eating. Courtney is passionate about educating the public on the benefits of a nutrient dense diet, and she encourages sustainable, chemical-free farming practices to ensure better health for people and the planet. Courtney Swan: Our current agriculture system's origin story involves large chemical companies -- not farmers, chemists. 85% of the food that you are consuming started from a patented seed sold by a chemical corporation that was responsible for creating agent orange in the Vietnam War. Why are chemical companies feeding America? Corn, soy and wheat are not only the most common allergens, but are among the most heavily pesticide sprayed crops today. In 1974 the US started spraying our crops with an herbicide called glyphosate, and in the early 1990s we began to see the release of genetically modified foods into our food supply. It all seems to begin with a chemical company by the name IG Farben, the later parent company of Bayer Farben, provided the chemicals used in Nazi nerve agents and gas chambers. Years later, a second chemical company, Monsanto, joined the war industry with a production of Agent Orange, a toxin used during the Vietnam War. When the wars ended, these companies needed a market for their chemicals, so they pivoted to killing bugs and pests on American farmlands. Monsanto began marketing glyphosate with a catchy name, Roundup. They claimed that these chemicals were harmless and that they safeguarded our crops from pests. So farmers started spraying these supposedly safe chemicals on our farmland. They solved the bug problem, but they also killed the crops. Monsanto offered a solution with the creation of genetically modified, otherwise known as GMO, crops that resisted the glyphosate in the roundup that they were spraying. These Roundup Ready crops allow farmers to spray entire fields of glyphosate to kill off pests without harming the plants, but our food is left covered in toxic chemical residue that doesn't wash, dry, or cook off. Not only is it sprayed to kill pests, but in the final stages of harvest, it is sprayed on the wheat to dry it out. Grains that go into bread and cereals that are in grocery stores and homes of Americans are heavily sprayed with these toxins. It's also being sprayed on oats, chickpeas, almonds, potatoes and more. You can assume that if it's not organic, it is likely contaminated with glyphosate. In America, organic food, by law, cannot contain GMOs and glyphosate, and they are more expensive compared to conventionally grown options, Americans are being forced to pay more for food that isn't poisoned. The Environmental Working Group reported a test of popular wheat-based products and found glyphosate contamination in 80 to 90% of the products on grocery store shelves. Popular foods like Cheerios, Goldfish, chickpea pasta, like Banza, Nature Valley bars, were found have concerning levels of glyphosate. If that is not alarming enough, glyphosate is produced by and distributed from China. In 2018, Bayer bought Monsanto. They currently have patented soybeans, corn, canola and sugar beets, and they are the largest distributor of GMO corn and soybean seeds. Americans deserve a straight answer. Why does an agrochemical company own where our food comes from? Currently, 85 to 100% of corn and soy crops in the US are genetically modified. 80% of GMOs are engineered to withstand glyphosate, and a staggering 280 million pounds of glyphosate are sprayed on American crops annually. We are eating this roundup ready corn, but unlike GMO crops, humans are not Roundup Ready. We are not resistant to these toxins, and it's causing neurological damage, endocrine disruption, it's harming our reproductive health and it's affecting fetal development. Glyphosate is classified as a carcinogen by the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer. It is also suspected to contribute towards the rise in celiac disease and gluten sensitivities. They're finding glyphosate in human breast milk, placentas, our organs, and even sperm. It's also being found in our rain and our drinking water. Until January of 2022, many companies made efforts to obscure the presence of GMOs and pesticides in food products from American consumers. It was only then that legislation came into effect mandating that these companies disclose such ingredients with a straightforward label stating, made with bio engineered ingredients, but it's very small on the package. Meanwhile, glyphosate still isn't labeled on our food. Parents in America are unknowingly feeding their children these toxic foods. Dr. Don Huber, a glyphosate researcher, warns that glyphosate will make the outlawed 1970s insecticide DDT look harmless in comparison to glyphosate. Why is the US government subsidizing the most pesticide sprayed crops using taxpayer dollars? These are the exact foods that are driving the epidemic of chronic disease. These crops, heavily sprayed with glyphosate, are then processed into high fructose corn syrup and refined vegetable oils, which are key ingredients for the ultra processed foods that line our supermarket shelves and fill our children's lunches in schools across the nation. Children across America are consuming foods such as Goldfish and Cheerios that are loaded with glyphosate. These crops also feed our livestock, which then produce the eggs, dairy and meat products that we consume. They are in everything. Pick up almost any ultra processed food package on the shelf, and you will see the words, contains corn, wheat and soy on the ingredients panel. Meanwhile, Bayer is doing everything it can to keep consumers in the dark, while our government protects these corporate giants. They fund educational programs at major agricultural universities, they lobby in Washington, and they collaborate with lawmakers to protect their profits over public health. Two congressmen are working with Bayer right now on the Farm Bill to protect Bayer from any liability, despite already having to pay out billions to sick Americans who got cancer from their product. They know that their product is harming people. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI): Couple questions. So you really have two issues raised here. Any concern about just GMO seeds and GMO crops, and then you have the contamination, Glycosate, originally is a pre-emergent, but now it's sprayed on the actual crops and getting in the food. Can you differentiate those two problems? I mean, what concerns are the GMO seeds? Maybe other doctors on t

In this episode, Therese Markow and Dr. Daniel Aaron discuss the inadequate oversight of food additives by the FDA, particularly the agency's GRAS or “Generally Recognized as Safe” process, which allows unsafe additives to reach the market without proper scrutiny. Dr. Aaron highlights industry conflicts of interest, the lack of reporting requirements, the need for stricter regulation to protect public health, and discusses what is needed for the FDA to be better able to make impactful changes.     Key Takeaways: The majority of food additives in the US are not vetted by the FDA. Since 1958, food additives have been presumed safe until proven otherwise.  The Clean Eating movement in the US is indicative of the skepticism of the American food supply.  While the FDA used to maintain a list of GRAS substances, today, reporting to the FDA is not required.  Europe uses a more precautionary approach to food additives. The EFSA must approve all chemical substances prior to their use in foods.  Food additives are known to cause synergistic harm. However, the FDA poorly regulates single additives so it is not surprising that its consideration of interacting chemicals is insufficient.   "The FDA is the most accountable to corporate power. The largest impediment, in my view, to food regulation is funding. FDA's Food Center has been underfunded for decades. Further funding from Congress is needed, but our legislators often are supported by industry that doesn't necessarily want a more robust review of food additives." —  Daniel Aaron, M.D., J.D.   Episode References:  Bystanders to a Public Health Crisis: The Failures of the U.S. Multi-Agency Regulatory Approach to Food Safety in the Face of Persistent Organic Pollutants by Katya S. Cronin: https://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/faculty_publications/1725/  EFSA: https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en  FDA Food Center: https://www.fda.gov/food    Connect with Daniel Aaron, M.D., J.D.: Professional Bio: https://faculty.utah.edu/u6052921-DANIEL_G_AARON/hm/index.hml  Email: Daniel.Aaron@law.utah.edu    Connect with Therese: Website: www.criticallyspeaking.net Threads: @critically_speaking Email: theresemarkow@criticallyspeaking.net     Audio production by Turnkey Podcast Productions. You're the expert. Your podcast will prove it. 

OTC Phenylephrine is in the news! Join Ashlee and David Brushwood as they navigate the convoluted world of OTC decongestants, and the pivotal roles pharmacists play in ensuring patient safety and medication efficacy.   During this episode, the two discuss: 1. The role of the FDA in  managing GRASE, Generally Recognized as Safe and Effective, medications. 2. The FDA's original decision to include oral Phenylephrine products in the OTC monograph for decongestants. 3. The  CARES Act of 2020 and its impact on this efficacy and safety issue.4. The instrumental roles of pharmacists in managing these products and providing the best options to patients.  To access the FBA briefing document on the efficiency of Oral Phenylephrine as a nasal decongestant, click here. Follow CEimpact on Social Media:LinkedInInstagramDownload the CEimpact App for Free Continuing Education + so much more!

Support the showwe can all help...food for thought

In this interview, Andrea Donsky, Nutritionist and Menopause Educator and Research sits down with Morris Zelkha CEO and co-founder of TriNutra. Morris possesses more than 35 years of experience in the nutraceutical industry. Morris's company TriNutra is the only patented, USP-grade, full-spectrum, cold-pressed Nigella sativa (Black Seed) oil on the market standardized to 3% thymoquinone and very low free fatty acids. You'll understand this more after you hear the interview. 1:53 Why Morris' Thymoquinone is what we picked for Morphus ThymoQuin®.3:18 Discussion around the quality of black seed oils.6:46 Why absorbability is so important.8:14 What is the difference between fatty acids and free fatty acids?11:11 The important components of black seed oil and the meaning of full-spectrum.12:38 Discussions around regulations and quality of black seed oil supplements on the market.14:50 What should you look for on a label when buying Thymoquinone supplements?17:34 The amazing benefits of Thymoquinone are supported by research. Some of the benefits include supporting healthy blood pressure, balancing blood sugar, enhancing liver health, downregulating inflammation, and supporting the immune system and healthy respiration.20:24 Why lowering markers like blood pressure and improving insulin resistance are important in perimenopause and menopause. (Editor's note: If you currently take medications for blood pressure management, please consult with your physician before taking black seed oil. It has been shown to lower blood pressure in as little as three days and you'll need to figure out with your physician dosing for blood pressure medications.)24:03 How black seed oil can benefit non-alcoholic fatty liver (NAFLD).25:29 Warnings about who shouldn't take black seed oil as well as dosing guidelines. Black seed oil is Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) up to a max of 4 softgels a day. Start with 1-2 softgels a day.28:47 How black seed oil can improve gut health.29:49 Final thoughts on quality.Buy Morphus ThymoQuin®  Link to video for podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1EvbtkMLUcJoin our Wearemorphus PRIVATE group: https://bit.ly/2MsxBBf======

We explore what it means for the FDA to recognize food as "Generally Recognized As Safe." We explore the history of the law that brought us GRAS status in 1958 and what the current regulations offer. (Hint: they give the food companies leeway). We look at a couple of common examples of how this has not worked well in the best interest of American's health and what we can do about it. Referenced links: Search the FDA database for specific items to see how they got listed as GRAS. Explore sections of the code to see if ingredients you are curious about show up and what they say. 21 CFR part 182 21 CFR part 184 21 CFR part 186 21 CFR part 101 (food labeling) _______________________________________________ Connect with Nourishing Liberty! Read Liz's weekly articles on Substack -- Raw Milk Mama! Join the discussion here. Follow Rachel on Rachel's Hot Takes. We love to hear from you! Send all email and questions to NourishingLiberty@gmail.com _______________________________________________ Join us to learn about our food systems: How to grow and prepare your own food. Tips and tricks for time management for families so YOU can fully participate in your food system from start to finish. How to stay healthy and balanced in body, mind and spirit. Find the guide to local farms here Learn to grow your own food with permaculture principles. (This course guides you to grow your own food.)

In this episode, Mike is joined by Shaun Crew for a question and answer session with other founders. Shaun is the original Founder and former President and CEO of Hemp Oil Canada Inc. After founding Hemp Oil Canada in 1998, Shaun grew the company to great success, eventually becoming the first company in the hemp industry to receive Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clearance as Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS). Since selling the business in 2017, Shaun is now the Director at Merit Functional Foods and is passionate about helping other founders along their journey. Throughout this episode, Shaun answers questions about his thoughts on the new products in the hemp and cannabis space, how to find a mentor, advice on how to enter the market, and more. Follow Shaun Crew on LinkedIn Connect with Mike on LinkedIn Follow Mike on Instagram

In this episode, Mike is joined by Shaun Crew, the original Founder and former President and CEO of Hemp Oil Canada Inc. Originally founded in 1998, Shaun grew Hemp Oil Canada to great success, eventually becoming the first company in the hemp industry to receive Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clearance as Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS). Since selling the business in 2017, Shaun is now the Director at Merit Functional Foods and is passionate about helping other founders along their journey. Throughout this episode, Shaun talks about his entrepreneurship journey since starting Hemp Oil Canada Inc., using trade shows to build his business, how he creatively financed the business, what he learned about organizing and building an effective team, his experiences since selling the company, and more. Follow Shaun Crew on LinkedIn Connect with Mike on LinkedIn Follow Mike on Instagram

Are you struggling to give up eating junk food? You might be addicted to a hidden factor that is present in almost all pre-packaged food and most spice blends. In this episode Dr. Rodney and  Karen talk about a topic near and dear to their hearts because of the health change they made three years ago to eliminate this hidden factor from what they eat.That additive is MSG, a flavor enhancer that can be found in almost every pre-packaged food whether considered junk food or a healthy snack. Even items marked as having no MSG will have several other names on the pseudo-ingredient list.What is it?MonoSodium Glutamate (MSG) is much more than a seasoning like salt or pepper. In fact, it does not have a taste in and of itself. It makes food taste better, look fresher and smell better. It makes your salad dressing taste better and has even been added to baby food and infant formula. It is added so that people will want to keep on buying the product as can be seen the potato chip ad, “Bet you can't eat just one…”What is the history of this food additive?A Japanese inventor identified a natural flavor in seaweed called “umami.” It did not become popular until World War II when the U S military found out that Japanese rations tasted so much better than their own.Why is MSG so dangerous?Dr. Russell Blaylock, a board-certified neurosurgeon wrote a book called Excitotoxins: The Taste that Kills. MSG overexcites the taste cells to the point of damage or death causing brain damage in different degrees.Regular consumption of MSG can lead to:Eye damageHeadachesDepressionObesityFatigueDisorientationHow did it become so widely used?People began having a reaction known as “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome” that had lots of side-effects including numbness and heart palpitations. The FDA identifies these as “short-term reactions.” In 1959, The FDA labeled MSG as “Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) and it has remained the same ever since.  When the public became aware of the dangers they became more aware of reading labels. As a result, the food industry quickly started using many other names for this additive.The food industry has 13 other names for MSG:Autolyzed YeastGlutamateMonopotassium GlutamateTextured ProteinYeast NutrientCalcium CaseinateGlutamic AcidMonosodium GlutamateYeast ExtractGelatinHydrolyzed ProteinSodium CaseinateYeast Food25 Labels that contain MSG or create MSG during processing:Flavors and FlavoringsSeasoningsNatural Flavors and FlavoringNatural Pork FlavorNatural Beef FlavorNatural Chicken FlavorSoy SauceSoy Protein Isolate/Soy ProteinBoullionStockBrothMalt ExtractMalt FlavoringBarley MaltAnything Enzyme ModifiedCarrageenanMaltodextrinPectinEnzymesProteaseCorn StarchCitric AcidPowdered MilkAnything Protein FortifiedAnything Ultra-Pasteurized

Generally recognized as science is the idea that the words, images, and iconography of anything related to scientific endeavors must be factual, safe, and by implication followed under strict authority. When actions and words are performed and spoken simultaneously, but with contradictory projections, it must be understood that there is a dangerous mind game being played. Support this podcast

Generally recognized as science is the idea that the words, images, and iconography of anything related to scientific endeavors must be factual, safe, and by implication followed under strict authority. When actions and words are performed and spoken simultaneously, but with contradictory projections, it must be understood that there is a dangerous mind game being played.

A top Gastroenterologist Doctor of over 14 years who has a Master of Science in Clinical Investigation (MSCI), Certificate in Nutrition, contributed to 20+ published scientific articles, and and 40+ presentations at national meetings. Author of the New York Times, USA Today and Publisher's Weekly Bestseller Fiber Fueled, and Founder of Theplantfedgut.com Dr.B and his team helps thousands of people in creating incredible results in their health and wellbeing with one simple act: learning to take better care of their gut health with the power of plants. He realized getting to the root cause of these diseases and ailments were much more effective than what he was able to accomplish using his prescription pad. His goal is to be a trusted, research based resource helping people everywhere to create positive change in their lives. In this episode we discuss: What is the Microbiota? How our gut is our second brain. Gut health link to depression. How to recover from gut health damage. Generally Recognized as safe? Gut health link to cancer. And more!! Dr. Will Bulsiewicz, MD, MSCIWebsite: https://theplantfedgut.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theguthealthmd/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theguthealthmd/ The Plant Fed Gut Course: https://theplantfedgut.com/course/ Book: https://theplantfedgut.com/book/ Let's connect and CONQUER! Download! Subscribe to this Podcast Leave a Review! Check me out on ALL Platforms: https://flow.page/moussamikhail Follow me on IG: @MoussaMikhail https://www.instagram.com/moussamikhail/ Watch on Youtube: https://youtu.be/TBrUDl1JGJ4

Marijuana as of 2020 is now legal in 15 states in the United States. CBD products are popping up in can drinks nearly every where you look these days. Is it legal? Can cider now be fused with cider or at least CBD or perhaps THC? Find out in this special presentation prerecorded at CiderCon2020. Opening slide to: Current regulatory status of marijuana and CBD beverages Presentors Attorney Marc Sorini and Attorney Alva Mather of McDermott Will & Emery LLP Marc Sorini Alva Mather Topics presented: How The Controlled Substance Act (CSA) impacts marijuana use. Status of marijuana Under Federal Law The politics and law relating to cannibus The Cole Memo during the Obama Administration running through the Trump administration Appropriation restrictions affecting marijuana law Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) vs Cannabidiol (CBD) Industrial Hemp Agricultural Act of 2014 (2014 Farm Bill) vs Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018    (2018 Farm Bill) Former Commissioner Gottlieb statement in 2018 and its impact on FDA regulations How the Food Drug Administration(FDA) and the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) work together regulation cider Is marijuana Generally Recognized as Safe (GRS) by the FDA? What is the enforcement concerning CBD products? What does the future hold for having THC in cider? Why labeling (COLA) counts! From the presenter's presentation: TTB has made it clear that it will not approve any formula for a product containing a Schedule I controlled substance TTB has also made it clear that it has conferred with FDA and will not approve a formula for a product containing ingredients not recognized as GRAS   Help Support Cider Chat Please donate today. Help keep the chat thriving! Find this episode and all episodes at the page for Cider Chat's podcasts. Listen also at iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher (for Android), iHeartRadio , Spotify and wherever you love to listen to podcasts. Follow on Cider Chat's blog, social media and podcast Twitter @ciderchat Instagram: @ciderchatciderville Cider Chat FaceBook Page Cider Chat YouTube

On this episode of CPG Insiders, Mark and Justin are joined by Ashish Talati. Ashish leads an FDA practice and is one of the industry’s foremost experts on FDA regulatory matters.   He is also very knowledgeable when it comes marketing law. Mark and Justin ask Ashish for his opinion of what can - and cannot - be said about certain products. They explore the importance of understanding what category your product will fall under and the difference between the categories. They address the differences between the FDA and the FTC and discuss some of the things that can land your company in hot water with these federal agencies. Ashish then explains the importance of working with a law firm that specializes in handling claims and the federal agencies. Finishing up, Ashish explains some of the ins and outs of copyrights and trademarks. They discuss the difference between the two and the importance of utilizing these to protect your business and products.   More about Ashish Talati: Ashish R. Talati leads Amin Talati & Wasserman’s FDA practice and is one of the industry’s foremost experts on FDA regulatory matters. He has gained an exceptional reputation for his successful results at the cutting edge of FDA and regulatory law, where he has responded nimbly to changes in the regulatory climate and the marketplace, guiding clients through some of our industries’ most complex issues. Ashish primarily counsels clients on matters of regulatory compliance, helping them anticipate and address regulatory issues in their day-to-day business operations and strategic planning. He also advocates on their behalf before the FDA, FTC, Customs, USDA, DEA, and other federal agencies, and in court. He is considered a leading authority in the areas of Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) requirements and New Dietary Ingredients (NDI); Ashish and his team do more NDI and GRAS projects than many of their competitors combined, and are known for their representation in the highest numbers of NDI matters submitted to FDA overall.  Considered a creative and strategic partner by his clients, Ashish works with companies all over the globe and is a trusted advisor at every step of the product life cycle, including product formulation, safety and efficacy studies, product launch, and ongoing marketing and sales. In addition to his pioneering background in FDA regulatory matters, Ashish is highly regarded for his wealth of knowledge on advertising regulations. He counsels clients on compliance issues and claims substantiation in connection with their advertising and marketing programs, and represents advertisers in both defending and challenging claims before the Better Business Bureau’s National Advertising Division (NAD) and other regulatory bodies. In addition to legal advice, he prides himself on providing business-oriented solutions which minimize risks and enable his clients to reach their corporate goals. The companies with whom he works prize his immediate accessibility, his wide range of contacts in the regulatory arena, and his deep expertise gleaned from a sharp focus on this area of law.  Prior to law school Ashish worked as a Chemist and a GMP auditor for the pharmaceutical industry. He also brings a tremendous amount of GMP experience to help respond to FDA 483’s and Warning Letters. Contact Ashish Talati: Website: https://amintalati.com/professionals/ashish-r-talati/ Email: ashish@amintalati.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashishtalati   To contact Jekyll & Hyde, visit https://jekyllhydeagency.com/ or call 800.500.4210.

INGREDIENTS OF THE DAY:  None Have you ever wondered how our modern commercial food system got to be so chock full of additives in the first place?  There’s something like 10,000 chemicals approved for food use.  And how does a new food additive get approved for use?  The answers to those questions are both historical and complicated, and I will attempt to tackle them in this episode. Show Notes:  To Contact Show:  foodlabelsrevealed@gmail.com Facebook Page:  https://www.facebook.com/prophetofprocessedfood/?ref=bookmarks The podcast can be subscribed to at the iTunes store or using most of the podcast apps available for smart phones or tablets.  Just search under Food Labels Revealed. References: Swindled: The Dark History of Food Fraud from Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee by Bee Wilson https://tinyurl.com/y8qkkdtc  The Poison Squad by Deborah Blum https://tinyurl.com/ybbuylnv FDA Database:  Substances Added to Food https://tinyurl.com/y6uza7yp Smithsonian Magazine:  Where Did the FDA Come From and What Does It Do https://tinyurl.com/y2h9fw3b Cranford, New Jersey Neighborhood Newsletter: Historic Resident Fought for Pure Food Laws https://tinyurl.com/ycvk843z FDA Consumer Magazine: The Story of the Laws Behind the Labels https://tinyurl.com/yaxddnhk  FDA:  Sugar, A Cautionary Tale https://tinyurl.com/ycjvdank Food Safety News: The GRAS Process https://tinyurl.com/ybkfpcgt Public Integrity:  Why the FDA Really Doesn’t Know What’s in Your Food https://tinyurl.com/y943pm9o NPR:  Why the FDA Has Never Looked at Some of the Additives in Our Food https://tinyurl.com/yc7kyutx  Natural Resources Defense Council:  Generally Recognized as Secret https://tinyurl.com/yau85tqk North Dakota State University:  Overview of FDA’s GRAS https://tinyurl.com/y8fp2m5j    Music: Intro music is the "Peter Gunn Theme" by Henri Mancini Outro music is "Happy Boy" courtesy of Kevin MacLeod

Keep off the grass. And also the GRAS. The first one you've probably heard of. The second one is Generally Recognized as Safe. The vague language should be a tip-off that GRAS doesn't mean that it's been confirmed as good for you. The dose makes the poison, and that's true for a lot of things that are GRAS, especially cosmetics. Still, nature is what brought us lead, arsenic, and asbestos, so try to make informed decisions rather than just living "naturally".See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There are so many additives in our food supply that there are likely many you are unfamiliar with. In this episode, we discuss which should be avoided and why. Our conversation opens with a discussion about how these ingredients make it to market, the Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) list, and what happens after something is on the GRAS list. Ingredients discussed include: natural flavors, carrageenan, polysorbate 80, artificial colors (yellow #5, caramel color), MSG, and others.Email: Healthformation.Podcast@gmail.com Instagram, Twitter: @HealthFormPod

00:22 - Cap'n Crunch was created by Pamela Low in 1963. 01:50 - Urban Dictionary defines Cap'n Crunch Mouth as "When the roof of your mouth gets all torn up after eating Cap'n Crunch or some other rough food." 02:23 - Underunderstood: The 9/11 Hoax That Wasn't 03:15 - The Try Guys: Eugene Ranks The Most Popular Cereals 07:11 - A collection of tweets claiming Cap'n Crunch has shrunk 08:21 - My Brother, My Brother and Me 16:20 - Partially hydrogenated oils (or PHOs) were deemed to be no longer classifiable as GRAS (which means "Generally Recognized as Safe") by the FDA in 2015. 16:29 - Here are photos of a box of Cap'n Crunch from 1995 with "partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil" listed as an ingredient. It seems to have been replaced with "palm and/or coconut oil" in Cap'n Crunch currently sold in the United States. 18:38 - Jason Liebig on Twitter 18:44 - CollectingCandy.com 21:53 - Jason's Instagram is fun but his Flickr is INCREDIBLE 23:06 - Rockin' the 80’s – Tale of the 30-Year-Old Snickers 23:50 - New York Times article from 1994 about the Doritos redesign 25:05 - An archived version of Wikipedia featuring "Hot and Cold Nerds." 25:16 - Nerds Hot and Cool - Discovered!! A CollectingCandy.com World Premiere!! 25:49 - Statement from Quaker Foods 27:17 - Cereal Time TV - Gabe Fonseca's YouTube channel 27:46 - Gabe Fonseca on IMDB 27:48 - Gabe eating Cap'n Crunch from the 90s on YouTube 28:19 - Screenshot of Gabe holding old Cap'n Crunch up to the camera 29:46 - Gabe's measurement on the vintage Cap'n Crunch box 30:16 - Billy's photoshop to determine the size of 90s Cap'n Crunch 34:45 - Official written statement from Cap'n Crunch Episode artwork by Phil Robibero

Cannabis Concentrates Panel LIVE @World Trade Center Seattle The Talking Hedge... your cannabis business podcast. PANELISTS: Jim Makoso, Lucid Oils Find The Talking Hedge on all your podcast platforms: Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKFX84kKLsbCC2S2bcWQUOg/ Stitcher https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/anchor-podcasts/talking-hedge Radio Public https://radiopublic.com/talking-hedge-WxzP0o Pocket Cast https://pca.st/6U18 Breaker https://www.breaker.audio/talking-hedge Google Podcasts https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy9hMzhiYWQwL3BvZGNhc3QvcnNz Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/talking-hedge/id1463394034?ign-mpt=uo%3D4 Anchor https://anchor.fm/talkinghedge Overcast https://overcast.fm/itunes1463394034/talking-hedge Soundclound https://soundcloud.com/talkinghedge Libsyn http://talkinghedge.libsyn.com Radio.com https://app.radio.com/zHUJfELm5X Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/4o9aRePkgnfUjSyWIo1wHq?si=a2yS3QJ_S4CFQO7p6DeTwg TuneIn https://tunein.com/podcasts/Business--Economics-Podcasts/The-Talking-Hedge-p1233217/ iHeartRadio https://www.iheart.com/podcast/263-the-talking-hedge-46861417/ Spreaker https://www.spreaker.com/user/talkinghedge LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-talking-hedge/ Pandora ...coming_soon Alexa ...coming_soon --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/talkinghedge/support

Imagine you’re in a supermarket and you want something healthy to drink, but you want something tasty, too. Many people might think – and with some good reason – that a naturally flavored drink like grape juice or orange juice would provide a beverage that’s refreshing and good for you. But with the choices available to consumers in most supermarkets, they would be wrong. Why?   There are two assumptions many people make about their choices at the market based on labeling. 1) That a “natural” choice is always a healthy choice and 2) that the guidelines and advice given on food labels are straightforward and relatively transparent. They aren’t necessarily right. If you’re concerned about eating healthy but you’re not sure how best to do it, get in the habit of reading food labels … and you need to know how to read them, too. (check part 1 for more info.) If you wanted orange juice as a healthy way to quench your thirst, there are some reasons to opt for water instead. Why is that? Too much sugar is bad for you and processed foods are full of them. But some foods that advertise as “natural” foods are, too. A typical 8-ounce glass of pure orange juice can have around 21 grams of sugar, which is more than half the 36 grams recommended for men and only 25 grams for women. You may have read the packaging to be doubly sure and noticed that nothing was added to the juice. That made it look like it was “healthy” and “natural” which in moderation it can be but there’s almost an entire daily dose of sugar for women in a single 8 ounce glass. You have to know how to read your food labels to avoid fooling yourself There are plenty of other ways that food labels can undercount, deflect or underemphasize the potential unhealthy ingredients or components that go into food and food products. Here are some tips to avoid some unhealthy traps: Nutrition information is based on a 2,000 calorie diet. Your particular healthy calorie intake may vary significantly. Fats can also sneak into food labels in some interesting ways. Looking out for artificial fats (like trans-fats) and added sugars is only part of the healthy reading you need to do. If you’re eating things that don’t list a lot of beneficial nutrients (like iron, fiber, and vitamins) you might be consuming a lot of empty calories. Beware of sneaky trans-fats. If the label says “0 grams of trans fat” but also lists “partially hydrogenated oil,” that means there is less than .5 grams of trans fat – not a lot, but it’s there. In today’s confusing food environment, you need to be educated to stay healthy. One of the best ways to do that is to learn about food labels.   KEY TERMS & IDEAS: Nutrition information on food labels is based on a 2,000 calorie diet. When you’re assessing the information on food labels, remember to take into account the daily calorie intake that is healthy for your body’s needs, which may be more or less than 2,000. Just because something is “natural” does not mean that it is automatically good for you. Fruit juices, for instance, are full of sugar and drinking a lot of juice could raise your sugar intake to very unhealthy levels. Trans fats. “There are two broad types of trans fats found in foods: naturally-occurring and artificial trans fats. Naturally-occurring trans fats are produced in the gut of some animals and foods made from these animals (e.g., milk and meat products) may contain small quantities of these fats. Artificial trans fats (or trans fatty acids) are created in an industrial process that adds hydrogen to liquid vegetable oils to make them more solid. The primary dietary source for trans fats in processed food is “partially hydrogenated oils." Look for them on the ingredient list on food packages. In November 2013, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) made a preliminary determination that partially hydrogenated oils are no longer Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) in human food.”   LINKS & RESOURCES: Durish Mozaffarian and Diyi Shangguan, “Do food and menu nutrition labels influence consumer or industry behavior?” STAT, February 19, 2019, https://www.statnews.com/2019/02/19/food-menu-nutrition-labels-influence-behavior/, accessed March 2019. “The best and worst things you can do for your heart,” MDLinx, February 25, 2019, https://www.mdlinx.com/internal-medicine/top-medical-news/article/2019/02/25/7558495/?utm_source=in-house&utm_medium=message&utm_campaign=heart-feb26, accessed March 2019. “Trans Fat,” heart.org, March 23, 2017, https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-eating/eat-smart/fats/trans-fat, accessed March 2019. “Understanding food nutrition labels,” heart.org, March 6, 2018, https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-eating/eat-smart/nutrition-basics/understanding-food-nutrition-labels, accessed March 2019. Follow Dr. Nada on: Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/nada-milo... Sage Tonic www.sagetonic.com Sage Tonic on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/sagetonic/ SUBSCRIBE: Apple Podcasts: http://bit.ly/SpartanUpShow YouTube: http://bit.ly/SpartanUpYT Google Play: http://bit.ly/SpartanUpPlay FOLLOW SPARTAN UP: Spartan Up on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/spartanuppo... Spartan Up on Twitter https://twitter.com/SpartanUpPod CREDITS: Producer: Marion Abrams, Madmotion, llc. Writer and Host: Nada Milosavljevic MD, JD

09 - 13 - 18 Author Marcela Magda Popa MD Keep Away From GRAS Generally Recognized As Safe by Dr. Ned Hoke This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit healthmatters.substack.com

What does an obscure but insidious FDA rule, marijuana, mint, wheat and the wisdom of Carl Spackler have in common? Probably nothing. But they are all interesting and entertainingly related to health and wellness. In this episode of The Karma Sense Foodcast, we explore a loophole in FDA regulations that allows food manufacturers to slip anything they want into our food system, the health benefits of marijuana, the value of incorporating mint into your diet and what in the actual fudge is wheat grass. 00:15 Introduction 01:09 Generally Recognized as Safe? 15:30 How Medical is Marijuana 21:46 Mint 28:59 Wheat Grass For complete show notes, mosey on over to https://www.daveyhwellness.com/foodcast/gras/