Calley Means
speaker
1,357 appearances
15 recordings
7 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard 9 Apr
Calley Means’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 — 2 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Did five years of head and neck surgery training. And at the end of that training, before launching out into being a private practice or academic attending physician, I looked around me at what was happening in American health more broadly and realized that even though I'm working hard in my lane as an ear, nose, and throat surgeon, More broadly, American health is just getting destroyed.
It's getting destroyed. Chronic illness is exploding across the lifespan. And that's not something that I really learned about in medical school. At the best institutions in America, the hospitals, the medical schools, we're not talking about why. We're talking about how to medicate these conditions. We're talking about how to operate more on these conditions.
It's a huge deal, Charlie. The food industry is making the point that if you basically phase out ingredients that are banned throughout the rest of the world, it would impact 60 percent of food on grocery shelves in the U.S. They were saying that as if it was an argument not to do it. To me, that's an argument to do it. We have a huge problem where let's just take the food, guys.
These are petroleum and coal tar. Every study and every piece of common sense would tell you that if a kid eats that every day, it's going to cause issues. It clearly causes ADHD. Every other country in the world has led to the conclusion that it should be out of the food supply. The FDA, up until the Trump administration, has been a sock puppet of big food, big pharma.
And Charlie, it was momentous and extraordinary yesterday. As of 4 p.m. yesterday, the FDA said this petroleum-based dyes, that they were safe. Marty McCary got up there with Secretary Kennedy and said it is poison. They said the FDA and the U.S. government and the Trump administration is going to take common sense actions to get these no-brainer chemicals out of our food.
Charlie, we talked about this a lot. There's a chronic disease crisis. President Trump and Bobby Kennedy talk about this all the time, right? We have 38 percent prediabetes rates among teens in this country. They're going to take common sense action, common sense wins.
And we're going to look back on history at this year and this first hundred days of the Trump administration when finally the HHS, the FDA and the U.S. federal government stood on the side of kids.
Zero nutritional value whatsoever. They literally had scientists in a lab figure out how to combine literal petroleum to figure out how to make that neon red and that neon blue. And this is really important, Charlie, because this is, I'm a free market person. This is actually a free market movement. This is correction of corruption. I always talk about it.
The cigarette industry took over the processed food industry in the late 1980s and 1990s. They're the ones who really popularized these colorings. And they bought off the USDA to say they were safe. They bought off the FDA. They added 10,000 chemicals into our food. The cigarette industry owned 40% of the US food supply in the 1990s. So there was real corporate capture here
to tell us that these ingredients were safe for the sole reason of making that color pop actually charlie it's amazing we've dug into this the u.s companies make the food make the fruit loops make all these foods in the u.s with watermelon juice with carrot juice and they ship them to canada and shipped into europe u.s exported food they make with safer ingredients
So they've bought off the organizations here just to have that color a little bit brighter, knowing, knowing that it's harming kids. Actually, Charlie, Mr. Paxton, Ken Paxton in Texas, just filed a lawsuit against some of the food companies because he thinks that they knew this many years ago, and he's actually searching for evidence of that. But that's clear.
I mean, the food companies knew what they were doing, and they said it's safe for kids. So... Again, just common sense. We've got a long way to go, Charlie. There's going to be win after win coming from Secretary Kennedy and President Trump. But but but these are no brainer actions.
you hit on something else. So I'll name the names, the Consumer Brands Association, the American Beverage Association. These groups to this day are arguing petroleum based dyes are safe. And the American Beverage Association, Charlie, another huge win from President Trump and Secretary Kennedy. They've said we need to take soda off food stamps. Why is soda
Soda, sugar-laden soda, the number one item on food stamps, $140 billion entitlement program that's supposed to be going to nutrition for lower-income Americans. We are literally subsidizing $10 trillion, excuse me, $10 billion a year from food stamps from the federal treasury to soda companies. The American Beverage Association just last week said it was anti-science.
to suggest that subsidized soda for kids increases obesity. So these groups, the American Beverage Association and the Consumer Brands Association, which is where all these food companies hide, should absolutely be called out. You mentioned the dietary guidelines and Froot Loops not being healthy in general. That's very important. The U.S.
government recommends Fruit Loops as part of a healthy diet. The NIH funded a study under Biden that said Fruit Loops and Honey Nut Cheerios were healthier than ground beef, than grass-fed beef and eggs. That's literally the guidance that's been coming out of the NIH. That study was also funded by food companies. A very important thing Secretary Kennedy is going to do.
It's not regulation, but it's getting control of our dietary guidelines. We're Right now, the dietary guidelines recommend this crap to kids. They recommend added sugar as part of a two-year-old's healthy diet. They recommend ultra-processed food as part of a healthy diet. They say meat is bad and the best source of protein is beans. It is insane.
President Biden said the top goal for the nutrition guidelines during his term was equity and inclusion. It should be about scientific rigor. Secretary Kennedy yesterday at HHS said a profound statement to me, Charlie. He said, sugar is poison. Now, that doesn't mean we're banning sugar. That doesn't mean you can't have your Coke.
But we should not be recommending it from the government, and we should not be subsidizing it. That's the first two years of MAHA here, Charlie. We're going to get the scientific recommendations correct so parents can make informed decisions, and we're going to stop the subsidies. Right now, 90% of our agriculture subsidies go to ultra-processed food, corn, soy, wheat.
0.4% go to fruits and vegetables. There's some basic market co-option that Secretary Kennedy, working closely with Brooke Rowlands, who's been a champion on this, is going to fix.
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