Joe Biden’s “Cancer Moonshot,” touted in the State of the Union address; the effort to have Ozempic approved as an anti-obesity drug for Americans 12 and over, and paid for by the government; and the recommendation that all children have the full set of COVID vaccines to attend school in the fall are the final straws in a power and money grab that can devastate American health and longevity and drive up health care costs by the trillions of dollars — which, by the way, appears to be the plan.
In an act of Olympian Darwinism, America may have created its own “Doomsday Machine.” The wheels and gears of the machine include our health care system, our medical research system, the pharmaceutical industry, the processed-food industry, Big Agriculture, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), our financial services industry, and our entire political system. They all support and finance one another to promote addictive, disease-promoting “food products” to create a sicker America; to “treat” Americans with drugs and “health care” that leads to a sicker America; to protect and defend one another through all legal, marketing and political channels; and to benefit from huge growth and unearned profits.
And the fuel for the system is really bad, processed “food.” For those global leaders, masters-of-the-universe types, who see de-population as the only real answer to the climate and resource crises, perhaps it is a dream come true. And, President Biden hinted at it, with a beautiful sleight of hand, in his State of the Union: pretend to restrict drug companies with moderate price caps on insulin, and then give Big Pharma trillions of dollars for “cancer research.”
In brief, America leads the world with a metabolic disease calamity. America is killing itself through greed, and this disproportionately hurts minorities and the poor.
Data on global obesity reflect cultural Darwinism. America leads all countries in obesity by a wide margin — it is the heavyweight champion. Forty percent of Americans ages 15 or older suffer from obesity. In Japan and Korea, the numbers are 4.2 and 5.5 percent, respectively. The United Kingdom, Germany and France weigh in at 26.2, 23.6 and 17 percent, respectively. And this is a recent disaster. In 1950, following World War II, fewer than 10 percent of Americans were obese. These data alone prove that research coming out of Harvard, apparently designed to support the sale of weight-loss drugs — that obesity is genetic and can be cured only by medication — is absurd. Just as absurd is the recently released Food Compass that lists Lucky Charms (and other sugary cereals) as healthier than unprocessed beef and eggs.
The central problem is that rising obesity rates reflect insulin resistance, a key marker of metabolic disease, which then leads directly to most major killers (type 2 diabetes, heart disease, cancer, stroke and more), as well as Alzheimer’s disease, which some have termed “type 3 diabetes.” This is leading to plummeting fertility rates; some scholars estimate that American sperm count will hit zero by 2045 because of synthetic, endocrine-disrupting chemicals filling our food, air, water and homes from personal care products, pesticides, plastics, preservatives, food packaging and more. All of this leads to skyrocketing health care costs. And the principal culprit, of course, is food and the American diet.
Dr. Mark Hyman says food is medicine. Food carries the molecular information that tells a body how to be healthy or how to get sick. You really are what you eat. And in America, processed food may be poisonous. Now, the industrial food and health care machine wants the government to pay for lifetime injections, for Americans over 12, of a drug that promotes weight loss but does little or nothing to address the underlying bad-food/metabolic-disease scourge. It is equal opportunity: All Americans can be unhealthy at any size.
Since World War II, America has created gigantic industries in industrial farming to efficiently grow unhealthy, pesticide-laced food; processed food manufacturers and restaurant chains to create, market and sell unhealthy food; a health care industry that grows based upon disease from unhealthy food; a pharmaceutical industry that profits from creating drugs to treat the symptoms from unhealthy food; and a financial services industry that profits enormously from the growth and profitability of all these industries. As a whole, this machine represents at least 40 percent of American jobs and GDP, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, and influences university research, many media outlets, and the U.S. government, through research grants and the hiring of NIH and USDA retirees, paid advertising, and political contributions and lobbying.
The machine is virtually unassailable and unstoppable. America is spending vastly more on health care than the rest of the world and getting sicker. Many victims are children and middle-class and poor families, especially minorities. It’s a diabolical business.
But the weapon to slay this dragon is deceptively simple: It’s regenerative farms and real, unprocessed food — pastured meat, eggs, fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds and legumes; no processed sugar, no seed oils, no refined grains. Removing subsidies for harmful food and eliminating these products from public financing (e.g., SNAP and school lunches) could help reverse the health crisis in America quickly and save trillions of dollars in health care costs.
If Biden is serious about bringing down health care costs and his Cancer Moonshot to cure fatal disease, this is the way to do it. But so far, Darwin is laughing.
Grady Means is a writer (GradyMeans.com) and former corporate strategy consultant. He served in the White House as a policy assistant to Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, where he chaired the Food Stamp Reform Task Force and served as White House oversight to the National Health Insurance Experiment. Follow him on Twitter @gradymeans1.