Brigham Buhler
speaker
1,533 appearances
6 recordings
5 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard 27 Feb
Brigham Buhler’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And, you know, me, Callie and the other folks that sat on this panel, you know, our goal was to just share our stories and share what we saw. And so my testimony in particular was really more about the human side. You know, there's so many staggering datas and statistics and numbers. But behind all that is a person. That's all I wanted people to understand. These are human lives.
When Jelly Roll testified, I think he said this equivalent to a 747 jet worth of people die of opioids a day. And that's insane. And that all started with the lapses in the FDA and the drug regulatory market. And we know that – There's an argument out there. I know Cali released the number of 50 plus percent of the FDA's funding comes from Big Pharma.
When it comes to drugs alone, 75 percent of the drug funding comes from the pharmaceutical companies themselves. And so there's a big market there. And with Big Pharma spending over $8 billion a year advertising, that's more than the entire sum of the FDA's budget.
Yeah, it's insane. And those ads are wild. But what I saw is, the truth is, my hope is that people listen and the American people fight. We can fight with our pocketbooks. We can fight through our choices as citizens. Do I have faith that the government's going to fix these problems overnight? I don't. But at least we're having the conversation. And to their credit, they let us speak freely.
They didn't put a censor on us. They you know, they tried to give us some coaching, you know, to say, hey, if you go this route, just understand there's going to be blowback. And, you know, we're here to get progress on these topics, not, you know, burn the house down type deal. And then I did have some and it was it was a bipartisan effort.
So some of the senators in the room had mentioned, well, the American people just want a pill. You know, they don't really want a solution that they're not. They're looking for an easy way out. And I pushed back. It's funny because one of the moms that was there was like, oh, my God, I can't believe you were just dropping F-bombs in that meeting. But I'm like, I think you're fucking wrong.
I mean, after being in health care since I was 20 years old, what I see is people struggling for answers.
Who was saying that the American people just want a pill? I don't want to name any names, but one of the senators there was saying in his experience people are looking for the easy way out. And I don't think that's the case. I think people are looking for hope. Well, here's the thing.
And that was, our hope was to break down from the start of how do we process these foods? How do we grow, harvest, and what do we do with our soil? What do we do with our pesticides? How do we bring these products to market? How do we regulate our food industry? And that's all new to me. That's not my expertise.
My expertise and my testimony was focused on what I saw as a drug rep, what I saw as a med device rep, what I saw billing insurance companies. And that was a part of the talk that we didn't even get to dive deep into. But the goal was to explain to the Senate that.
From the food processing, growing, harvesting, chemical treatments, to the packaging, to the ingredients we add into our food, to the hospital systems, throughout the system, front to back, the American people are set up for failure. In the 1950s, the FDA had approved 700 different ingredients in our food products. That's it, 700.
Today, there are over 10,000 chemicals and petrochemicals in our food products in the United States. In Europe, still 700. Jesus. And what gets crazier is when Food Babe, she's an influencer, right? And that's been, you know, crapped on by the media.
Yeah. But she's an advocate, and she's just a voice, a mother out there saying, hey, guys, what's wrong with this picture? Let me show you what's in Froot Loops in America, and let me show you what's in Froot Loops in Canada. The same manufacturer, Kellogg's, is selling one product to the American people and a safer – less ingredient, less chemical-filled product outside the United States.
They have the ability to sell it here, but they don't because they know they can sell more addictive, more colorful, vibrant, that attract kid food sources here in the U.S. It's so dark. And so we walked through all of that. It blew my mind on the food front. And we know, you and I have talked, like in the healthcare system, my main message was,
We're here to talk about the boom in chronic disease. We know that food and our environment has a huge impact on that, but so does preventative care. And so does building an ecosystem that allows clinicians to troubleshoot and diagnose and prevent chronic diseases from evolving in the first place. These are all metabolically related disease states.
All the chronic diseases that are killing us can be traced back to diet, lifestyle, and nutrition, but none of our clinicians are trained on diet, lifestyle, and nutrition.
All those things are killing you.
Yeah. But you and I've talked about this with some of your comedy friends that have become my friends, too, to watch the evolution. You just got to give people momentum. We just got to get some wins on the board. We got to give them hope. And we've got to start by having the conversation. And that's what I was optimistic about for the first time in my adult life.
The Senate is willing to sit down with a group of individuals and have a deep conversation about where our food comes from, how our food is being processed, what ingredients are in our food and how that could potentially lead to chronic disease. And it got labeled by some of the. I would say hatchet job media outlets that have come out, and we can dive into that.
What's hard is they went immediately at, like, these are all entrepreneurs that have something to sell you. And I can tell you, sitting in the room with those people, all of us were scared. All of us were scared. It's scary. I'm not going to make money off of this. If anything, I could lose money. I have businesses that are under the FDA's guidelines, are under the FDA's oversights.
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