Dr. Marty Makary
Appearances
Morning Wire
Trump Backs Off Tariffs & Al Green Censured | Afternoon Update | 3.6.25
Half of our nation's children are sick and nobody has really been doing anything meaningful on this front until we have gotten new momentum and enthusiasm from Secretary Kennedy and President Trump to finally address the root causes of these diseases, general body inflammation and generalized insulin resistance. And food has a big part of it.
Morning Wire
Trump Backs Off Tariffs & Al Green Censured | Afternoon Update | 3.6.25
When we eat foods with a lot of molecules that do not appear in nature, these are chemicals. These are chemicals that the industry insists are safe, a subset of which are concerning. There's a body of research now that suggests concern with some of these ingredients. We have to look at those ingredients.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Is It Time To Pull the Covid Shots Off the Market?
I don't know what it's for, but I'll take it. And so we're looking at everything. As you may know, one of my first actions as FDA commissioner was to remove pharma and industry members from FDA advisory committees wherever statutorily possible. We want American pharma companies to thrive and businesses doing business in the United States to thrive. but we want a user-friendly process for pharma.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Is It Time To Pull the Covid Shots Off the Market?
We want to partner with them. We want to facilitate innovation and discoveries and cures. But the scientific review process and the integrity of the FDA must remain independent, and that is our commitment As a administration.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Is It Time To Pull the Covid Shots Off the Market?
Good to be with you, Charlie.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Is It Time To Pull the Covid Shots Off the Market?
Well, thanks, Charlie. Great to see you and good to be with you. So politicians have been talking about this for a long time. And this is one of those common sense things that nobody has been willing to actually do. And this is what I love about President Trump. Here you have Americans paying 10, 12 or 15 times more for the same medication.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Is It Time To Pull the Covid Shots Off the Market?
that Germans or British folks or people in France are getting at the lower price. And nobody has said, stop, wait a minute, what's going on here? By the way, sometimes these are American companies that are price gouging Americans as other wealthy nations get these sweetheart low prices. So the president has basically said no longer.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Is It Time To Pull the Covid Shots Off the Market?
And he's not saying it as a, you know, looking for small incremental changes here. He wants dramatic changes to create a level playing field. He wants to make sure Americans can get the same most favored nation status price that these other countries are getting.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Is It Time To Pull the Covid Shots Off the Market?
And I think you're going to see a real change in the price of these medications when you pick them up at the pharmacy and in the medical bill. Meaningful changes that are going to be pretty massive.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Is It Time To Pull the Covid Shots Off the Market?
Work, work, work, save money, work, save money, use debt, work, save money, get education, have food, help others, have clean food, have a loving wife, be warm, not sick, have wisdom, develop, be smart. How will the nation progress? You don't know. Just stop telling.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Is It Time To Pull the Covid Shots Off the Market?
Yeah, good point. So most favored nation status is a declaration that Americans deserve the best price of a medication that is sold to wealthy countries, what we call OECD countries. So we're not saying we need the price that... Yeah, Ethiopia has or other poor countries. We're saying we want the price that wealthy nations get. They negotiate prices. They have a free market.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Is It Time To Pull the Covid Shots Off the Market?
Why is the United States paying for all this R&D and upfront costs from basically price gouging Americans? Now, some will say that it will mean lower profits for pharma. Well, pharma has to figure out why they are charging such a lower price in other countries. They need to reconcile this massive disparity. And some might say that there might be less money for R&D. Well, I don't think so.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Is It Time To Pull the Covid Shots Off the Market?
Pharma is pretty smart. They're going to create a level playing field because we are asking them to and we're doing it in a kind way. But we are also letting them know that we have the full regulatory authority of Medicare, of the Federal Trade Commission, of the trade representative, of the Department of Justice to ensure no monopoly pricing.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Is It Time To Pull the Covid Shots Off the Market?
And even at FDA, we have good relationships with pharma, and we also have some carrots and sticks. So you're seeing an incredible coordinated effort come around now to try to bring this, to bring it home, and to actually make it happen. This is something politicians have talked about, but no one's made it happen.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Is It Time To Pull the Covid Shots Off the Market?
They've probably been worried about the pharma lobby, which is a massive lobby in Washington, D.C. I actually think when we see lower prices for Americans... you're going to see more access for lower income and minority communities. They have had a tough time paying high prices in the health care system across the board. Hospital bills, doctor's bills, drug prices.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Is It Time To Pull the Covid Shots Off the Market?
So we're actually going to see more access, not less, as some may argue when they say that, you know, R&D is going to take a hit from this. That's going to mean less drugs available. I think you're going to see more availability.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Is It Time To Pull the Covid Shots Off the Market?
Is it as simple as that? Yes, it is, because Barack Obama talked about doing this. Bernie Sanders has talked about this a fair bit. Bill Clinton talked about this. As a matter of fact, in his second term, he talked about it a lot.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Is It Time To Pull the Covid Shots Off the Market?
But all of them came short of actually doing it, because it takes a bold move where you're willing to go up against massive special interests and lobbyists to get this done. But it's also something that... sort of polls very low among the lobbyist community, but polls very high on Main Street among everyday Americans.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Is It Time To Pull the Covid Shots Off the Market?
So I think you're going to see some really amazing activity on this, and I'm excited to be a part of it.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Is It Time To Pull the Covid Shots Off the Market?
Well, we're going to see. We're going to work hard at this. There's a lot of things we can do at FDA. One of the main issues in drug pricing is monopoly pricing. So at the FDA, we can do more to bring more generics to market. We can move drugs to over-the-counter where there's more price transparency. And we can also facilitate the generic version of these expensive drugs called biologics.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Is It Time To Pull the Covid Shots Off the Market?
They're the things that are running nonstop. After I do a TV interview... They, you know, okay, thank you, Dr. McCary, for coming on. And then nonstop ads for these biologics. Why? Is it because there's an epidemic that's new around the conditions that they treat? No, it's because they're gouging Americans and the proxy payers for Americans, their employer groups and their insurance plans.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Is It Time To Pull the Covid Shots Off the Market?
And so those biologics have generic versions that are much less expensive. They're called biosimilars. And the FDA... has been slow to get those biosimilars to market. There's a lot of reasons for it. We're going to streamline that, and we're going to encourage more biologics. And let's remember, we got the Maha Commission report coming out next Thursday, May 22nd.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Is It Time To Pull the Covid Shots Off the Market?
And the best way to lower drug prices in the United States are to stop taking drugs we don't need.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Is It Time To Pull the Covid Shots Off the Market?
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Is It Time To Pull the Covid Shots Off the Market?
We don't, and it's not helping. The more antidepressants we prescribe, the more depression there is. The more ADHD medications we prescribe, the more ADHD there is. The more opioids that were prescribed, the more opioid addiction there is. I mean, we are going backwards. We're not in a good place. We're watching our nation's kids sick.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Is It Time To Pull the Covid Shots Off the Market?
putting their hand on their belly because they don't feel well. That makes them depressed. It brings on so many problems. There's learning loss. There's all kinds of neurodegenerative disorders that are on the rise. I was told a lot of lies in medical school. One of them was that Alzheimer's was going up because we have an aging population that's expanding. Well, guess what?
The Charlie Kirk Show
Is It Time To Pull the Covid Shots Off the Market?
Early onset Alzheimer's has gone up threefold in recent decades. That's not explained by an expanding early population. Kids are not overweight and have diabetes and prediabetes because of a willpower problem. This is something adults have done to children.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Is It Time To Pull the Covid Shots Off the Market?
And the F in FDA stands for food, which is why we are looking not just at removing all petroleum-based food dyes, as we announced two weeks ago. We're looking at all chemical ingredients in the U.S. food supply that are banned in other countries that have concerning health issues. And that is our focus. It's on food, not just on drugs.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Is It Time To Pull the Covid Shots Off the Market?
Absolutely. Look, we have to public we have to safeguard public safety. That is the number one mission of the FDA. That means no more pill-popping, having no idea what you're taking. It means we take a look at ads on television to make sure you're getting accurate claims as to what the side effects are.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Is It Time To Pull the Covid Shots Off the Market?
So we are going to use the full extent of all the regulatory authority we have to make sure people are properly informed and not just... We are drugging our nation's kids at scale, and nobody has been talking about root causes. We need to look at everything.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Is It Time To Pull the Covid Shots Off the Market?
Look, I'd love to see the evidence to show that giving young, healthy children another COVID shot, you know, a sixth COVID booster would help them. But that evidence does not exist. And so we're not just going to rubber stamp things at the FDA. And I don't think you're going to see a push at the CDC anymore. to be pushing COVID shots in young, healthy children.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Is It Time To Pull the Covid Shots Off the Market?
That is something that's being discussed right now. I think you're going to see some announcement on that in the coming weeks. But I know they are trying to review all of the scientific data, and guess what? There's no data, there's no good randomized control data that the current version, the latest formulation of the COVID shot is necessary for young, healthy children.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Is It Time To Pull the Covid Shots Off the Market?
Other countries have already recommended against it. Other leading countries in Europe have recommended against it for young, healthy children. So I think you're going to see a look at this and you're going to hear something forthcoming.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Is It Time To Pull the Covid Shots Off the Market?
Well, I think at minimum it's propaganda. It's probably one of the greatest pieces of misinformation put out by the United States government on health is that food pyramid. It was not about what's good for your health. It was about what companies wanted you to buy. And so that has done a tremendous amount of damage in all seriousness.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Is It Time To Pull the Covid Shots Off the Market?
You have kids now that are growing up sick because of that food pyramid. You have companies that got rich because of that food pyramid. You have doctors and scientists who put their head in the sand because they were afraid to challenge that food pyramid. Well, we're not afraid to challenge it. The FDA is actively involved in revising our nutrition guidance.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Is It Time To Pull the Covid Shots Off the Market?
The secretary has asked us to make that front and center. You're going to see a new... Framework for health put out by the Maha Commission next week. You're seeing an enlightenment right now, recognizing it's not calories in, calories out. That's the old misinformation dogma. It matters what those calories are. Your macros.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Is It Time To Pull the Covid Shots Off the Market?
Your macros, you can't just pump in ultra processed foods and think, you know, all sugar is it can be broken down into a calorie energy expenditure. It matters. People have got to be eating whole foods, natural foods, things that appear in nature. And we have turned a blind eye to that as a government until now.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Is It Time To Pull the Covid Shots Off the Market?
Well, we're looking at that, Charlie. The secretary and the president have asked us to look at that because people may not be getting a fair representation of what these drugs do and their side effects. You're not always dancing and singing every time you take one of these medications. I mean, sometimes you watch these commercials nonstop and you think, OK, I give up. I'll take it.
The Dan Bongino Show
Did President Trump Just Hint At His Next Target? (w/ Ned Ryun) | Episode 52
I think it's a bad recommendation. I mean, you certainly know that by six months of age, all children will be vulnerable to a virus that is continuing to circulate. There have been retrospective studies looking at children, meaning people less than 18 years of age who've gotten a yearly vaccine to show that there is benefit. So it doesn't make sense.
The Dan Bongino Show
Did President Trump Just Hint At His Next Target? (w/ Ned Ryun) | Episode 52
I think it puts children unnecessarily in harm's way. And there are There have been about a thousand deaths from COVID during this pandemic in children. About one third of those deaths were in children who were perfectly healthy before that. So I think it's a bad idea. Also, I don't like it that they didn't consult advisory committees. They didn't consult the public.
The Dan Bongino Show
Did President Trump Just Hint At His Next Target? (w/ Ned Ryun) | Episode 52
They just went behind closed doors and made this decision unilaterally from a man, RFK Jr., who said that he believes in transparency and he said that he won't take vaccines away from anybody who wants them. And he's done neither of those things.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
It is pretty wild. It's pretty cool.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
The FDA regulates about 20% of the U.S. economy.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
And the agency has had a lot of opportunities to modernize, so we've been busy.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
Yeah, right away.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
Yeah, the agency has gone through cycles where it's been captured by the industry it's supposed to regulate. And that was probably the ultimate low point of the FDA. And, you know, we have to... recognize that we can create health crises as a government, as we did with OxyContin. That was an illegal label. That was an approval for chronic pain based on a 14-day study.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
And so it was totally inappropriate. Vioxx, we learned years after it was approved that 38,000 Americans may have died from Vioxx. So we're doing something pretty cool, which is to get eyes on a drug the second it's approved in big data. So we're using AI. We're using big data.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
We are using computational modeling to predict if a drug is dangerous before it goes through animal testing because mostly animal testing is unnecessary. And so we're reducing animal testing. We've made that announcement. You know, God did not put these animals on earth for us to torture them. And so we are figuring out every place where animal testing is unnecessary.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
Yeah.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
i mean just because you can do something in science doesn't mean you should and look at you know messing with a bat coronavirus in wuhan or doing these beagle experiments you know they were trying to show that a fly could spread a certain a certain biting type of fly could spread a certain infection well you don't need to do these mad scientist experiments to yeah to know that and if you know it what are you going to do with that information so
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
We're reducing unnecessary animal testing. We're doing it with NIH and Jay Bhattacharya. Yes. And so we're doing a lot of cool stuff, and it's an exciting time.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
What happened? We're bringing back science to this process. You know, when I got there, the FDA was just rubber-stamping COVID vaccines and was going to do so in perpetuity every year. So if a girl born today lives 80 years, they would get 85. COVID shots in their lifetime with an FDA just rubber stamping with no clinical trial data every year just approving. So we said we're not doing that.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
We're bringing back science. We are going to require for healthy Americans some clinical data to let us know that these COVID shots are still safe and effective. That is, you need them. How do you know you need them? I mean, COVID now is... less virulent, the population immunity is ubiquitous. I mean, with hepatitis B, we say you need two or three shots, depending on the age you start.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
With MMR, we say two. Why is it with the COVID shots, it's 80? And using the flu model doesn't work because flu's been around for 80 years, and we have a long experience. There have been 40 plus trials on the flu shot. It's a totally different animal. It doesn't, COVID doesn't mutate anywhere near as fast as the influenza virus. So how can you make an honest recommendation without clinical data?
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
We're bringing back data.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
Well, as you may have seen in the news the last couple days, it turns out the FDA knew about the myocarditis complication in young boys. Yes, swollen hearts. Swollen hearts with now evidence that, say, roughly a third or more will have long-term scar tissue. That is what appears to be permanent.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
They knew about the myocarditis complication and did not make a public announcement or disclosure or warning about it until months after when they should have. So this is the sort of stuff that ruins public trust and hurts all of us who are physicians, who need the trust of the public. So we're taking a lot of steps to try to rebuild that public trust.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
And one of those steps is to say, show us the data. We're going to be evidence-based.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
You know, I think a lot of people are appropriately asking that question. And a lot of people are saying no hepatitis B shot at birth in the delivery, you know, on the day of delivery for my child. Because it is, it's spread by a sexually transmitted or a bloodborne occupational hazard. I mean, what's the baby going to do, like step on a hepatitis B needle while they're in the hospital?
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
So a lot of people appropriately say this doesn't make sense. And so, you know, I think the CDC is taking a look at all of that. I think you have to respect the questions people are asking. You can't blow them off. The most dangerous thing you can do in medicine is to put out something with such absolutism when the data is very flimsy to support it.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
Now, they might say, we're never going to see the kid again, so this is our chance to get them immunized. Well, these are human beings. They're not aliens or wild animals that you've captured and you get to poke and prod them. We have to do things based on good evidence, and the evidence to support doing it at birth is really not there. Other countries don't do it at birth.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
85% of healthcare workers did not get the COVID booster last season. Yes. What does that tell you?
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
That's what they're saying. It's always the same couple doctors that these news outlets are citing. It's their go-to people. These are the same folks that misled us during COVID. And so – No, look, I think we've got to rebuild public trust. The way you do that is being incredibly honest. We're being very transparent with everything we're doing at the FDA.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
Dr. Vinay Prasad and I just published in the New England Journal of Medicine last week our framework of how we see COVID vaccine regulation, basically saying we've got to get back to both gold standard science and common sense. We've got to be practical. It's been four years since we've had randomized trials in humans that showed an efficacy. It was a very different virus then. It was
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
a better match with the circulating virus. There was low natural immunity in the population. And we learned that some of that effect was transient. That is, your baseline risk came back to almost the baseline level after a transient period. We cannot be blind. We have to use a scientific approach. And we do that for every other drug at the FDA, right?
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
Cures for cancer, you know, and it's for certain types of cancer, that is, not all cancer. And why does it take 10 years for a drug to come to market in the United States? We've got to ask these big questions. So we're streamlining the process every place we can.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
It's the great American ripoff. So what's going on here with these prices? We're getting taken advantage of. I mean, I think they're laughing at us. In other countries, they negotiate, you know, sweetheart deals that the drug companies give them in other countries. So a drug can be one-tenth the price, you know, a drug for $1,100, $1,200 in the United States. Yeah.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
is $88 in London and 100-some in Germany. And so they're laughing at us. Now, Pharma's budget for research and development is about 15% to 20% of their overall revenue. Their budget for marketing is 20% to 30%. So they're spending more on these commercials where everyone's dancing and singing nonstop. I mean, I watch some of these. so-called news shows.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
And it's basically a nonstop running pharma advertisement with an occasional insertion of some news. And then we got to go right back to break. And then it's more singing and dancing. Are these claims, are they creating an accurate picture of the claims of the medication?
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
And so we're looking at everything. We're looking at direct-to-consumer ads. Yep. Meaning potentially banning those? We would not ban them, but we have the ability to assess whether or not they're providing an accurate picture for the viewer.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
And honestly, I don't even know if these companies are trying to entice people to use their products or they're just channeling money to all the news outlets.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
Yeah, it's tricky because on one hand, we believe in the First Amendment. And on the other hand, we don't, as an FDA, we don't want a company to misrepresent their product to the public. I mean, the process that they go through to get approved by the FDA includes a part where they have to show what their claims are to the public. And are they creating a notion
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
That if you just take our drug, you're going to be singing and dancing and playing the banjo and on jet skis and, you know, nonstop. I mean, I watch these things are so convincing. Yes. You know, I don't even know what the drug is for sometimes. And I'll be like, OK, I'll take it. I give up. I give up. I'll take it.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
So pharma and industry had people as members of our FDA advisory committees. In other words, some of the FDA advisor, almost all the FDA advisory committees had a pharma or industry employee as a member of the FDA advisory committees. One of the first things I did is I removed all industry and pharma members of FDA advisory committees wherever statutorily possible.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
We have to have a scientific process that's impeccably independent. At the same time, we can partner with America's pharma developers and inventors and create a user-friendly process for them, streamline the process. One of our goals is to deliver more cures for the American public, and there's amazing stuff now for neurodegenerative diseases, for diabetes.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
I mean, the stuff that I see, it's an amazing privilege at the FDA to see what's in the pipeline. We, you know, our goal is very simple. We want to use gold standard science and common sense to bring more cures for the American public and meaningful treatments. Yes. And healthier food for children. And so you saw we banned or we went ahead with the removal action on the petroleum based food dyes.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
So we took that bold step. It's incredibly popular. What do those food dyes do to people? Why remove them? There's obviously a reason. There have been some studies suggesting that they affect the behavior of children.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
There are many parents who have said that when they eliminated, in sort of an elimination diet, these artificial petroleum-based food dyes, there's nine of them in the United States, when they eliminate them, the kids' behavior improves. And when they're reintroduced, then the kid's behavior gets worse again. So those are data points. They're not randomized controlled trials.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
There was a randomized controlled trial that found the same conclusion. So we're saying, what are we waiting for? Do we want to do a randomized trial injecting half of our nation's children with petroleum products and half without and then follow them for 10 years?
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
It has no taste.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
It's messing with a kid's brain. There have been studies that show it's messing with the developing brain of a child, kind of suggesting these are attractive. Yes. You know, if you create these very attractive rainbow of colors, kids are drawn to them. And so—
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
You know, what we're doing is we're creating, we have a food system in the United States now that's 70% ultra-processed in the diet of kids. And thousands of ingredients that are banned in other countries that we have all over the U.S. food supply, including these petroleum-based dyes.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
You know, the food companies make two versions of their cereal, one for Americans with the petroleum-based dyes and one for Canadians without and, you know, and Europeans without. Mm-hmm. And so what are we doing? We are drugging our nation's kids at scale for behavioral problems, for depression, for autoimmune diseases, for diabetes, for obesity.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
And no one is talking about the ultra processed food. So we are we now have this Maha Commission report that is taking a hard look at that and sets our agenda.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
I don't know of any that do both, but maybe you're thinking of Monsanto is owned by Bayer, the drug company. Monsanto that makes pesticides is owned by Bayer. Yeah. But I think a lot of people look at this stuff and they're just like, can't we just get back to whole foods, like things that grow out of the earth? So we're doing a lot on foods at the FDA.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
USDA does a lot of the organic inspections and FDA also, but I think it's good to generally move towards less chemicals in the diet. I think it's just a good thing. I think it's good for kids. It's not a perfect label, but it does indicate that there are far less chemicals or sometimes even no chemicals in the food. Right. Okay.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
Look, maybe we need to treat more back pain with ice and physical therapy than just surgery and opioids. Maybe we need to treat more high blood pressure by talking about the quality of somebody's sleep instead of just throwing antihypertensives after antihypertensives at people. And maybe we need to talk about food as medicine and the microbiome. And that includes, we have to look at everything.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
And that means, can we take a different approach to some patients with diabetes. Can we not just treat them with insulin and metformin and all the drugs I've been prescribing my entire career at Johns Hopkins and talk about root causes and get them fresh, healthy foods and get them educated on a lot of these issues instead of the misinformation of the food pyramid the government has propagated?
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
And can we talk about things like cooking classes instead of just treating people? We have a reactionary health care system. Yes. purely throwing medication and operations at people. I mean, that is almost 99% of it. And we need to be not just reactionary, but proactive. And that's what the Maha Commission report outlines. It looks at everything. It looks at light exposure in children.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
It looks at microplastics, talks about pesticides, talks about ultra processed food being 70% of the child's diet today. Something is going on and no one has a good explanation. 40% of kids now have a chronic disease. And half our nation's kids are sick in some way. Forty percent of chronic disease.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
ADHD, depression, diabetes, obesity, something we call insulin resistance, which is sort of early diabetes or prediabetes. If you take five college students and they all look thin as a rail, just like you do, like healthy and healthy. Probably two of them has early insulin resistance. Wow. And that is because it may not manifest at that young age where the body is very resilient.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
But we've got to talk about it. So we can't just feed bad food to our nation's children, drug them at scale, and blame them for their sickness. That's what we do. We blame kids for being sick subconsciously.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
Oh, yeah, you're right. I mean, two generations ago, a pediatrician might see one kid with type 2 diabetes in their career.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
Yeah, and now it's like 20% of kids, one in five kids will have diabetes or prediabetes or early insulin resistance of teens. And so what are we doing? We've got to stop. Sometimes we're engaging as a medical profession in the over-medicalization of ordinary life.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
The kid doesn't sit still in a desk when you mess up their circadian rhythm, feed them ultra-processed refined carbohydrates, and then they won't sit still at a desk for six hours, and we say, bad kid, take this medication.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
Yes. Yes.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
Look, we have to do everything we can because the path we're on is totally unsustainable. You know, health care is the biggest part of the federal budget, and it's not just Medicare and Medicaid. The Defense Department has its own health care system. Half of Social Security checks now are being used for health care expenses from uncovered services and co-pays and co-insurance.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
It is consuming our U.S. economy. It is an underlying problem. problem that's burdening businesses and the competitiveness of the United States and individuals. And so we have to tackle this by not just talking about the issues around the periphery, like different ways to pay for things in healthcare. We have got to talk about the health of the population.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
Yeah, well, 70 percent of health care costs are related to chronic diseases. And The drug costs is another portion of that remaining amount of the budget. And so the president wants to see drug prices go down by 50 to 80 percent. He's sick of us getting ripped off. And you're seeing Mehmet Oz, who's really a transformational leader over at CMS.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
Talk about an entirely new fresh approach of paying for health care. We can't just keep throwing good money after bad into this system. At the FDA, we've got to talk not just about gene therapy and proton beam therapy and chemotherapy, which is, you know, my old world. We've got to talk about that and healthier food for children. We've got to look at what we're consuming.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
You know, talc was in baby powder. And then they got rid of it because of an association with ovarian cancer. There's been a lot in the news about it. So we got rid of talc out of baby powder, but do you know... Over 20 million Americans are eating talc every day in their medications because it's used as a lubricant in the medication processing. It's in the medication.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
Kids are eating talc in candy. We just had a roundtable at the FDA on this issue. So we've got to examine everything we're doing and asking why are cancer rates going up in young people in the United States? Why is early onset Alzheimer's gone up by 35%? We've got to ask these giant questions by taking a look at our food supply, and that's a huge priority.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
Well, we're redoing the food pyramid with Brooke Rawlings and a lot of great food scientists. We are now redoing that entire pyramid.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
heap of misinformation that was foisted on the American public for decades, ignoring the role of refined carbohydrates and sugar, ignoring the role of ultra-processed food, ignoring so many of the dangerous food chemicals that are in our food supply that people have had concerns about. Scientists have been waving the flag for years about them. They're banned in other countries.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
demonizing natural fat. Natural fat has been around for millennia. I mean, and all of a sudden, you know, a bunch of doctors decided to demonize it. And they did three major studies to prove that natural fat was caught, that caught, it drove heart disease deaths. And all three studies failed to show that. And so they, they were, they didn't, they wanted to save face.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
And so they didn't, you know, when the medical field gets something wrong, they don't come out with a broad apology. You saw this after COVID, right? It's just kind of they just kind of fade out. You know, they just kind of fade back. Yes. And so we're redoing the food pyramid. And, you know, we may not get a perfect, but people should know that they've got to do.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
They've got to educate themselves with their doctors, with people who understand food and farming. regenerative farming and get back to the basics. Sometimes, you know, my grandmother had some of the best insights on nutrition and it turns out she was more right than all the experts I was taught by in medical school and throughout my training. So we got to get back to the basics.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
Drink water, cook instead of buy things pre-frozen and with 500 ingredients on a little bar.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
Why is it that in my career I've seen people come in with chronic abdominal pain, we do everything, every test under the sun, we throw meds at them, we give them these bogus general diagnoses, these umbrella terms that basically mean we have no idea. And no one can crack the case.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
And then we hear that they went to Europe for a summer and they're cured when they're in Europe because they're just eating healthier food over there.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
That is a seething indictment of our U.S. food supplies. And is it true? You and I have had this conversation before.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
Well, my medical education included a couple hours of nutrition education, but it would have been better if it were zero because the few hours were misinformation. I mean, it is historically one of the most corrupted sciences in all of science. Yes. That is nutrition. So people are seeing, you know, they're getting educated now directly through nutrition.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
podcasts with nutritionists and medical doctors like Peter Attia and Mark Hyman and people who are now bringing the truth. And it's amazing how in medical school we never once ever talked about pesticides and microplastics having estrogen binding properties or why the sperm counts have gone down 50 percent in the last half century. Yeah.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
or why the age of puberty goes down by a week and a half each year. We never talk about those topics, just kind of relegated into a corner of, oh, well, we don't have randomized controlled trial data on it, therefore we ignore it. These are the number one issues facing this country in our healthcare system.
The Dan Bongino Show
Is Something Big About To Go Down In Washington? - GUEST: Dr. Marty Makary | Episode 51
This Maha report puts those issues on the map and makes them front and center in our new healthcare agenda. There's no one silver bullet and there's no one ingredient causing this chronic disease epidemic. We have to look at all of it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
So you have this incredible body of literature emerging on this central organ system that is highly actionable, that we can talk about, that we can study. And it kind of lives in this corner because What specialty is it? And what NIH center is it? Is it infectious diseases, GI, is it oncology, is it primary care, is it functional medicine?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
And it has no home because we've created these silos, right?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
They're all doing- It's so connected. It's so connected.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
it's inherited the microbiome. So you pass on the skeleton of the microbiome to offspring. Antibiotics and C-section save lives. We've both seen that. But they're massively overused and they're messing up the microbiome in ways we don't even appreciate. And people are being given options without really knowing what... is potentially happening because of this. Now, I don't know what causes autism.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
Other smarter people may have ideas. But the researchers that did this study, and they're not no-name researchers, talking to Marty Blazer, who I think is the world expert on the microbiome. Yeah, Missing Microbes. Missing Microbes, great book. He told me that while they did not find an association with altering the microbiome and autism, they believe there is an association there.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
They think maybe they haven't sampled enough children or something. Now, I don't know if he's right, but if he's right, that is a massive signal in the data that we should be following.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
I'm chuckling a little bit. I mean, I love what you're saying, but I'm chuckling because I had this kid come in, a teenager who had the classic sort of irritable bowel, chronic abdominal pain. No one knows what it is, has had a million tests done. It doesn't show anything definitive. And I decided to take a lot of time with something we're not incentivized to do. Take a lot of time.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
I listened to the patient. I didn't look at the EHR. And it turns out that the kid had that same profile. Born by C-section, constant antibiotics, unnecessarily, it sounded like, throughout their early childhood, especially in the first three years when the microbiome is being formed, and had eaten terrible food their whole life. And then the mom tells me,
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
This condition, which we just give this diagnosis of irritable bowel. How could this possibly happen to my son? Well, I wasn't there when you got all these choices, but you've also been feeding the kid shit for the last 12 years. And so we're shocked. And then we have this massive whack-a-mole medical industrial system that's going to
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
order millions of tests and put the kid on some kind of IV IgG or some kind of Keytruda. It's like, can we talk about root causes?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
I saw a trial in China where they're treating autism with a combination of bacterial therapy or basically probiotics. Fecal transplants. Fecal transplants. And Shepard Pratt, affiliated with my hospital, Johns Hopkins, is doing a trial with probiotics and bipolar to treat bipolar patients. So it's like this is, you know, how much have we spent on cancer and what have we gotten for it?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
Almost nothing. Yeah. The ROI is almost zero. I mean, the top paper at ASCO, the cancer meeting, was like, oh, if we use Avastin for GBM of the brain, you can get another year. Couple months. Couple months. No added cure, right? So anyway, I love what you're saying, 100%.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
We have yet to really understand what's going on here. The rise in colon cancer in young, healthy people. Yeah, right. Turns out that there's an association with the microbiome. Being born by C-section and going on to have colon cancer before age 50 was an association just published in JAMA Surgery.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
You can't ask questions about vaccines.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
I've gotten that label a little bit for questioning the booster vaccine in young, healthy people, especially who have already had COVID. So the question is what the vaccine booster in young, healthy people is. Is there a benefit? And there was so much controversy and I saw how at the FDA it was pushed in with the political might of a top-down order that it made me ask some questions.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
The two top vaccine experts at the FDA were fired, directly fired by their superior for questioning the COVID vaccine approval for young, healthy people. That is the booster, the booster, not the original. So the CDC never released the data, and only the data we had was observational. The clinical trial data on the booster, it was basically just reamed through.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
They didn't go through the normal process. So then when you look at the risk of myocarditis, not to mention the other claims that are out there of people being messed up or injured or not the same after the vaccine, again, high-risk people early in the pandemic, it was very clear that the benefits outweigh the risks.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
But when you get down to a young, healthy 12-year-old girl, does she really need six COVID vaccine doses in three years?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
Well, they weren't too happy with me. Moderna constantly has people at their company trying to reach out to me. And so what is the risk of myocarditis of the COVID booster in a young, healthy person? I I ask that every time I'm engaged on this topic with someone who's like, how dare you not support the vaccination with the COVID booster in young, healthy people? What is that risk of myocarditis?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
It's one in 2,200 to one in 2,800. Heart injury from myocarditis. One person in a study of about 2,000 died in an ICU. Two others were admitted to an ICU in the New England Journal. This is the New England Journal. It's not like I'm making... So on a societal level, is there a net benefit or a net harm to giving the COVID booster to a young, healthy population? It's a net harm.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
If we actually do the math, it's a net harm, a small harm. But to mandate it, to force, you're going to create never-vaxxers by doing that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
We don't even know if that hospitalization, that's based on data where we don't know if the hospitalization is for COVID or with an incidental COVID positive test.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
Yeah. They've been great, actually. Hopkins, the School of Medicine has been terrific. My dean asked me to present to all the other department leaders, along with one or two other infectious diseases experts. And my dean said, I know you have a slightly different perspective on COVID and the vaccine booster in young, healthy people.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
So I'd like the department leaders at Johns Hopkins to hear both perspectives. And we had a wonderful dialogue. I've been active there as a surgeon and public health researcher for over 20 years before COVID. So they knew you were in a nut job. Yeah, they knew I'm a reasonable guy and I work hard and I mean well and I love this country.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
So I didn't get that kind of anonymity-based accusations you see on Twitter. Did you convince them? Um, I don't know, you know, you have people privately come up all the time to me. I don't know if you had this happen. We're like, Marty, I love what you're saying. I love to keep going. I can't say anything, but you keep, that's perfect. Right, right. What are you afraid of?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
You know, too many people are afraid of speaking up. It's still happening in so many areas of medicine.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
No difference. Yeah. Sometimes out of the operating room. In the recovery room, we notice the requirements go down.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
Without the surgery.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
Well, one thing that is a theme in Blind Spots and a theme in the research I learned was that if somebody put something out there with such absolutism, when the scientific evidence is really inconclusive or there's a lot of opinion, we just don't know what the long-term effects of GLP-1 are, for example. They just haven't been around long enough.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
How can you say with such absolutism that there's no long-term downside? We may see a benefit in the short term with some of these chronic diseases, but we may be accelerating frailty, which is basically loss of muscle mass. And that is, as you know, the number one predictor of longevity is muscle mass. And that's why we want people to be active when they're older.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
So we don't have that data and people are acting as if it doesn't matter. It'll go the way we want it to go. There are bacteria in the microbiome that produce GLP-1. Yeah. And maybe we should be talking more about- Probiotics. Having a very healthy- There is one. Yeah, maybe we- There is one. You already make some. So it's like, how can we not crush that?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
We're on a path of having every eight-year-old in America on three or four medications. It's scary.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
When they're children.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
I mean, already half of America are taking chronic medications and the average number is four. Once you get over 65, it's like you got to have these boxes to remember what to take. And look, medications save lives. You and I have seen that. That's part of the medicine we're trained in. We're going to convert America's children into a generation of patients.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
Maybe we need to talk more about school lunch programs than putting every kid on Ozempic. And that is not a conversation that we're having. We're just sort of celebrating, hey, high five. We found a way to create a GLP-1 agonist. We'll see about these new generation GLP-1 drugs that have a blocker on the muscle receptor, supposedly. They're going to enter clinical trial soon. Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
So to prevent the muscle loss. Yeah, prevent it or reduce it. Maybe. I believe in impeccable objectivity, changing positions as the data evolve. Right now, I have serious concerns about just giving out GLP-1s like candy. For side effects-wise or just beyond the muscle loss? The acceleration of frailty, the muscle loss, there – Some people don't do well with the profound loss of muscle.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
So, you know, there have been studies that have looked at weight and it turns out that fluctuating weight all the time is worse for you than staying overweight. That's right. That's right. So are people going to be, I'm doing better now and I don't need it. I need, I'm going on this vacation. I'm coming back. It's like, that's not, that's not good medicine.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
Yeah, known side effects.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
I love the pancreas. You love the pancreas.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
I do think everyone that goes into medicine is going in it for amazing reasons. And one thing that unites everybody in medicine is everyone has a sense of compassion that drew us into this calling. So we've got good people. But we walk into a bad system, and it's not a system we designed. It's a system we inherited. But we shouldn't defend it. It's entirely broken.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
We have a bloated NIH that funds research worse than the government funds the Postal Service. We have silos. That's pretty bad. There's a small group of people making all the decisions. At the very top, these are folks – where we need term limits, the folks where they decide what's important or not important, and it's based on their understanding of the world.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
Medical school education at every school in the United States is controlled by 19 people that serve on the board of a private company that determines the curriculum of every medical school in the country. And if you want to do something creative, talk about food or inflammation, You got to get back in line. Is this the company that creates the licensing exam? Or is this? AAMC.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
They run, yeah, the USMLE.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
And so these, and I've talked to deans of medical schools that have said, Marty, I'd love to talk about this stuff. All this stuff you talk about, all this stuff that are in the blind spots of modern medicine. And they say, we can't. Because the students know exactly what their learning objectives are for the boards. Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
And if we teach something else, they're going to skip that class and they're going to focus on memorizing and regurgitating the 55 enzyme names they have to spit out on an exam. Why are we forcing our youngest, brightest, creative, most altruistic minds to regurgitate the names of enzymes that you can look up on a... smartphone.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
And so we have this system now where a small group of people are controlling medical education, a small group of people control where the NIH dollars go, and who are funding the big questions central to health. For example, there's a new practice that's taking off of cutting the tongue under infants.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
The frenulum under the tongue. Sometimes they'll even do the side of the tongue or the frenulum under the inside of the upper lip. It's crazy to me. I have ENT docs that say there's a subset of kids that may benefit.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
If it's truly a foreshortened tongue, they believe there could be a benefit. It's never been proven, but they do believe there's clinical benefit. But then they say going to the upper lip and the side is crazy. They also say we need a good study on it. Well, there's a group of people out there that are calling every kid tongue tied, doing it routinely.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
Who's gonna, this desperately needs a randomized controlled trial. Who's gonna fund it? Pharma? No way. NIH? Not in one of their silos. American Academy of Pediatrics? Unlikely. And so this practice will go on.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
Maybe. Sometimes it is the advocacy groups, the philanthropists that fund research. Most of our research at Johns Hopkins on my team, which is – we call it the redesign of healthcare. It's on all the major topics in medicine that we are not talking about that we should be talking about. And we are a rapid response team. When the opioid epidemic hits, we go to work in days.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
When COVID hits, we go to work in days. The old NIH, you know, take a couple years, work on formatting a grant. They're funding these tiny incremental little projects. I don't even call them discoveries, like findings.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
Like, is it interesting what the average size of stones are on the street? No. Is it research? I guess.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
But we're funding these little dumb things, and then the big questions go unfunded. So we think the solution is philanthropic funding, reorganizing the NIH, term limits at the NIH, and a small- You mean for the director of the NIH, or- For all- all people who are in decision-making leadership power over grants at the NIH.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
And grants, in my opinion, when I say we, these are my opinions, the grant should be funded when one reviewer loves the idea, and then it goes into a pool, and you could... give out the grants randomly to when one person thinks that's a big idea, that could be interesting. Why do you have to have a consensus among the old guard establishment that yes, we're going to fund another study on stents?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
Yeah, it's a big blind spot, energy and mitochondria. I mean, it's the central connected sort of universal theory behind health is that there are these basic principles of mitochondrial health, inflammation, nutrients. We have such a nutrient-poor diet, all the stuff you've been working on. But next time you see Francis Collins, you can remind him that the H in NIH stands for health.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
Well, first of all, I think we insist on rules of transparency for clinical trials. Number two, if you're going to opine about a topic, do a clinical trial. The amount of opining around topics that the NIH throws out there, oh, we don't have good data on this. Well, you control the $80 billion budget over there at NIH. We saw this all during COVID.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
All the COVID controversies could have been settled immediately by them doing the proper clinical or randomized controlled trial on that question. All those questions, masking toddlers, natural immunity, the booster. Do the trial. Is it spread airborne or from touching surfaces?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
In the summer of 2020, six months into COVID, the NIAID and Dr. Fauci, sorry, I said something I shouldn't have said there. I mentioned his name. He was telling teachers- You can say his name. Is that okay? I know he's very, some people love him, some people hate him. No, you can say Dr. Fauci. I try to be objective, but so he was telling teachers to wear gloves and goggles in class.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
Do the freaking study. If you think it's spread by surface transmission, and you don't believe it's airborne, do the study. You got the $80 billion budget at the NIH. So one is increased transparency.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
Well, thanks for telling us. I think one of the biggest propagators of misinformation during the pandemic was the United States government itself. And it's not new, the food pyramid and- It wasn't just Trump saying put bleach in your veins.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
And it's not new. Peanut allergy is the same thing. We give people the wrong guidance. There's so many recommendations that people should be able to ask questions. I'm not saying be cynical. I'm not saying don't trust your doctor. But people should be able to ask questions. So if pharma does a study, regardless if that study goes their way or not, we should get the results immediately.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
That is a basic new principle of transparency we need to adopt in the United States. When Paxlovid, just as an example, the antiviral used, made by Pfizer to treat COVID, when that came out, the government recommended that for everyone. They promoted it. It was one of the biggest public health campaigns of the last year and a half of the pandemic.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
A study came out in the New England Journal of Medicine just a number of months ago that showed zero benefit in people under 65, none, zilch. The study, now studies go different ways and that's the way science is, but the study ended nearly two years prior. If you look at the actual tables, the results were, the study was done Why did the public not see it for nearly two years?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
Because it didn't go their way. When the COVID vaccine booster goes their way, they tell you before anything's even published. Just a press release, and it's a CDC recommendation.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
Yes. So this is the type of trial-level transparency we need. Yeah. And we've got to do it now, because otherwise we need better funding in academics. We need more civil discourse in medicine. We need less cancel culture. Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
Yeah. So a buddy of mine, Will Bruin, just graduated from medical school at – I don't know if I should say that school, but it's in the South. And he basically said he got two hours of teaching on all of nutrition and cholesterol and lipoproteins, basically. And in those two hours, and he got eight hours on a bunch of nonsense that he can't, you know, the disparity is unbelievable.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
The two hours on nutrition, he said it would have been better not to have those two hours because there was so much misinformation in him. All it was was HDL is good. Yeah, exactly. Go forth. Preach to the world. Check their total triglycerides. Turns out lipoprotein A and apoprotein B are very good predictors, at least better than the current old crude predictors. Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
of people that have early heart disease looking for general body inflammation. The tests aren't great, but I get a highly selective C-reactive protein. Said rate, not very good, but something. So trying to measure general body inflammation, the deposition of the types of lipoproteins that result in that plaque buildup.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
It's such little useful information. It's misleading. It is, yeah. And when somebody has an early heart attack in their 40s or early 50s, and it shocks everybody, sometimes we'll go back and get that test and it turns out their LP little a was up or the protein was up, even though the other numbers showed that things were okay.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
So next time somebody gets to set a lab test, I usually tell them, make sure that you've got that tested for at least once, LP little a, at least once it's genetically driven. 99% of cholesterol is made by your own body. And so these are some basic things that people can test for. And I'm really fascinated with the micronutrients and allergy testing.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
And that's something where you've got more expertise than I do. Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
Food sensitivity because... And nutritional testing. Nutritional testing because we've had this dogma from the American Academy of Pediatrics starting 24 years ago. that don't feed young kids any peanut butter related stuff, milk, eggs. There was this one, two, three saying, have you heard of this?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
Like your kids should get milk at age one, you can introduce a little bit of eggs at age two and then peanut butter at age three. Well, you got it so backwards. Peanut butter should get introduced a little bit, not in place of breast milk, but a little bit at four months, five months, six months, as soon as the kid can eat.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
The studies have even shown that five months prevents peanut allergies more than introducing it at six months. Four more than five. And so there's a strong association with what we call oral tolerance.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
And that's what the American Academy of Pediatrics got perfectly backwards when they told lactating and pregnant mothers, total peanut abstinence for you and kids zero through three, they didn't prevent peanut allergies with that recommendation. They caused them.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
Well, that's the thing. If you're going to put out a strong recommendation, either say, you know, this is based on just me shooting from the hip here. I don't know. Or... reverse it once the study comes out showing that it was wrong with the same vigor that you put it out.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
When the study came out in the New England Journal, 2015, what's that, nine years ago, showing peanut avoidance causes an eight-fold increase in peanut allergies. Say, gosh, we got this so wrong as an academy. We need to tell the world. Instead, they kind of fade out. You know, get the low-fat diet wrong for 60 years. They kind of fade out, you know? Get hormone replacement therapy wrong.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
Just kind of fade out. Where's the humility?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
You have a duty.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
And it's quite amazing what you've done. Well, you know, I go around and I talk to so many experts and I ask them, is there dogma in your field that is wrong or has been proven wrong or you believe is wrong, but it's still heralded out there as science when it's really just the way it's been done. It's just sort of custom. And they start unloading and they start telling you things.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
And actually the lipidology community is, has evolved entirely independent of the cardiology community. So the cardiologists kind of claimed lipid science at a certain point, but the lipidology community is like, hey, wait a minute, we've been studying this for a long time with hyperlipidemia, and they have very different views on things.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
So for example, lipoprotein A testing was recognized in the lipidology community as saving lives, as you mentioned, but not in the cardiology community because all their tests just use the crude LDL. Right.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
So I went to the head of the cardiology lipid center at Hopkins and I asked him, I said, I've been reading about LP little a, seems like it should be this subject of a massive universal public health campaign to get everyone to get it done. It'd be a lot better than trying to get a defibrillator in every bathroom in the mall, which is actually a real campaign Hopkins champion. Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
Saves lives for sure. Saves lives. But like here's something that's so – heart disease is the number one cause of death. So he acknowledged, yeah, there's some new research and we did put it in our new guidelines. I'm like, you know what? I read those guidelines, American College of Cardiology. It was a footnote. Like where's the enthusiasm? Where's the vigor?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
Where's the – it's just like molasses sometimes. Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
There is a drug in phase three clinical trial that targets lipoprotein little a. So we'll see what the results of that show. But I wonder if, you know, those are the people you want to just be more aggressive on maybe.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
and track. And maybe you get the cardiac CT angio on them instead of just a calcium score. Those are the ones.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
We just need AI. You just need some basic.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
I tell all our Johns Hopkins students and residents that what will make you a great doctor is knowing your limits. It's your humility. It's saying, I don't know when that's the right answer. And that was the right answer during COVID a lot of times. We didn't hear it. And so...
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
When I talk to a pediatrician and ask them about peanut allergies, you'll have somebody who will just recite a catechism. Well, according to the guideline of the American Academy, you know.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
Somebody else will think independently and creatively, and they'll say, you know, there's a guideline out there, but there's this study, and I've heard doctors suggest this, and this has been my experience, and I'm not sure. Or this is what one mentor thinks, this is what... That is a creative... That's a doctor you want. Doctor...
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
who thinks independently and isn't just falling in line with some dictum that says everyone obey and get in place. When we as a medical profession have used good scientific studies to make broad health recommendations, we shine, we help a lot of people. But when we wing it, when there's broad health recommendations made by a small group of people,
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
who are just ruling on an opinion and making it sound absolute like it's scientific data, we have a terrible track record. We ignite epidemics. We ignited the opioid epidemic saying opioids were not addictive.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
Pain is the fifth vital sign. These are manufactured. The peanut allergy epidemic. You go down the line, even you could argue the low fat contributed to obesity rates.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
You don't need AI. Just die for that. Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
And patients are very forgiving if you're honest in real time. Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
I've ushered so many people to the afterlife in the ICU. And, you know, I've done a lot of cancer care that – I'm constantly reminded how life is short. And these folks that are just afraid of what somebody's going to think if you just speak your honest opinion, I don't think that's healthy. And that's what we need more of.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
Sammy's the endocrinologist that started Virta?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
Yeah, you're big time.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
Safe? Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
The policy world is tricky because – There are so many things we can do without the government that we're not doing. For example, the Virta company that you mentioned, and I had met with the endocrinologist who was one of the, I think, co-founders or something. And he showed me that data. It was super impressive. I think that was him, yeah. Super impressive data.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
Just like you said, this is clearly something we should be doing. And it fits the whole what we've known and seen on the ground as doctors for many years. And that is the hard part of treating chronic disease is not telling people what to do. It's helping them do it. Behavior change. It's behavior change. It's checking in with them. It's being their friend. It's going along the walk with them.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
If I tell – I see somebody smokes on their chart. I don't do what I used to do and tell them, yeah, you should stop smoking or you're going to die. Now I ask them, you know, some people – Let's go outside and have a cigarette. We'll talk. Almost. I almost do that. I say some people really don't want to quit. They don't want to talk about it. And other people really want to. Where do you stand?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
And whatever answer you say is okay with me. Yeah. Most people say, I don't want to talk about it. And you're not going to affect them no matter what. But then you meet somebody that says, I just had a granddaughter. I'm dying to quit. We should put all of our energy in to help them with medication, behavioral, and everything. And that's what Virg is doing.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
It's saying, if you want someone to help and go down this walk with you and help pick foods and manage your diabetes instead of just pumping insulin and We're going to be there for you.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
And those are the solutions that in the private sector, employers that pay for healthcare, what we call ERISA plans, employer-sponsored healthcare plans, they're saying, you know, I'm going to make Virta available to my employees at this company. I'm going to make Teladoc. I'm going to make – and they're piecing together what we call these point solutions.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
So now you can be creative and come up with a food as medicine program. You don't need to wait for Medicare and their 50 bureaucratic red tape steps. You can go to work right away and that's the exciting thing. That's why I'm so optimistic about some ray of hope in this broken healthcare system because employers are standing up and they're saying yes to the challenges.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
They are, but at the same time, they see the demand for this. And if there's demand, they want to make those employees happy because they want to attract employees. Fertility services. Is there an ROI on it? No. But they know there's demand for those fertility services. So that is now enabling... smart people to say, hey, this makes sense medically in terms of improving health. Let's do it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
Let's try it. Let's do a pilot. And it's happening fast. We don't have to wait. These diabetes alternative, these companies now, they're not anti-dialysis. Sorry, I meant dialysis. So in dialysis, we have a system where we just kind of let people go into renal failure, then we put them on the machine. Well, what about actively getting them to avoid dialysis before they become dependent on it?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
So there's a couple of companies now, they're not the big ones, and they are actively working with people in that pre-dialysis phase of their life. And if they can avert one patient becoming dependent, it pays for itself. So this is the exciting stuff right now in medicine.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
Oh, it's great to see you, Mark. Keep up the great work. Um, so, um, I felt like there's so much new research that is directly speaking to these blind spots in medicine that people should know about it, not just in the medical community. But if my colleagues are fascinated by some new research that I'm presenting to them in a lecture –
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
Some of that research has direct implications for everyday folks out there. And so that's why I put this book together. So I hope people enjoy it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
I'm on Twitter. It's a bit of a nasty place, but I try to encourage people on it and LinkedIn a little bit. But great to be with you. So thanks so much, Mark.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
Well, it's great to see you, Mark. You know, I think I... It hit me at a certain point. I went as far as you can go in academic medicine, all the regalia, all the societies and honors and promotion and tenure. And it hits you at a certain point. I don't know if it's after I wrote 200 scientific articles or 250, but you realize no one's reading these things. The system is so broke.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
And the problem is we have a lot of smart people in a system where they're just collecting their paycheck every two weeks, putting their head down. This shouldn't be, this isn't right. And we feel like we're cogs in the wheel and people are afraid to get off the hamster wheel, take risks and call things out. So in the book, The Price We Pay,
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
My research team brought attention to this issue of price gouging and predatory billing, which is the term we called these kind of crazy bills that get thrown at people. They want a price. They're not given a price. And it ruins lives. And now we have this massive trust problem where some 62% of Americans say they have avoided care or delayed care for fear of the bill. Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
So you can have the cure for pancreas cancer now, but if – 62% of the population, it doesn't trust you, that pill's only 38% effective, not 100% effective.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
exactly right. So this is the game. I call it the game in the book, The Price We Pay. And we found that the game is designed to maximize profits. It's not designed to be honest with patients. And so the book actually led to some real legislation and an executive order from the White House that was entirely bipartisan that now requires hospitals to start
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
posting cash prices for common shoppable services. And the secret insurance discount that the insurance companies have with hospitals will all be public. All of that is going to start to happen this year. And that is because we felt firmly like... We got to do something. All the doctors lobbying organizations out there are just fighting for more money for doctors.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
And that's the Common Trade Association thing.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
That's not bad. That's not saying that we're not getting cut on Medicare, but- The healthcare system is more than just fighting for more money for your own special interest.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
You know, maybe we need to be treating more diabetes with cooking classes instead of just throwing insulin at people. We are the most over-medicated generation in the history of the world, right? And so we can keep treating high blood pressure with first line after second line, or we can start talking about sleep quality and stress management. And this is the new movement now in medicine.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
It's a real tension to address these giant blind spots. The microbiome is one of them. Food is medicine, general body inflammation, all the stuff that you've been teaching the public and the medical community about for a long time now. The microbiome may be the central organ to health. But it has no center at the NIH.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
There's a little tiny unit, and I talked to the person who runs it, and they're massively underfunded. But the microbiome trains the immune system, digests food, produces vitamins. It's involved in mood because some of the bacteria produce serotonin. It even regulates estrogen. It deconjugates estrogen into an active form. Now you're sounding like a functional medicine doc there, Marty.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
I think at heart I want to be one, but I don't have the expertise on which foods and vitamins. But what I'm interested in as almost a journalist within the medical profession is we have new, exciting research that relates to every disease process, every specialty, and it gets almost no attention. And this one study by the Mayo Clinic-
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
I think maybe the most significant study of the last 10 years, in my opinion, that got almost no attention. They looked at 14,000 kids and compared kids who got antibiotics in the first couple years of life compared to kids who did not.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
And the kids who got antibiotics in the first few years of life went on to have higher rates of chronic diseases. They had a 20% higher rate of obesity, a 21% higher rate of learning disabilities. Mm-hmm. a 32% higher rate of attention deficit disorder. All these things are on the rise. 90% higher rate of asthma, almost a 300% increase in celiac disease. All these diseases are going up.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
We're messing up the microbiome. That was the mechanism believed to the end, which how the antibiotics worked to induce the increased risk of these diseases. And how can you look at that and say, yeah, let's ignore that. There's nothing there. We may have Because there's no pill, Marty, to fix it. There's no statin for the microbiome. No pharma company CEO gets rich. But it's amazing now.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
The research on the microbiome is blowing me away. And they published this study in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings, which is, in our world of research, is a little bit of a flag that no one else would take it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
I think it's probably the most important significant study in the last 10 years. Wow. Okay, tell us about it. So, I mean, the fact that you have all these chronic diseases, I mean... We – all the stuff that is increasing, attention deficit disorder, learning disabilities, we scratch our heads. People come in and we diagnose them with celiac and they say, doc, how could this possibly happen?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
And we come up with some non-answer like, well, it's unknown or – It's genetic. Genetic. No, we have – I mean there's a study here telling us – 300% increased risk when you alter the microbiome with antibiotics early in life. And it's other things, it's C-sections, it's ultra-processed foods, it's high refined carbohydrates. So we have yet to really understand what's going on here.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Exposing The Flaws In Our Broken Healthcare System | Dr. Marty Makary
The rise in colon cancer in young, healthy people, turns out that there's an association with the microbiome. There's an association with polyps and antibiotic use. There's an association with C-section delivery. Being born by C-section and going on to have colon cancer before age 50 was an association just published in JAMA Surgery.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Get To Know The Incoming Trump Cabinet: Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, and More
Raise your hand if you think it should be a civil offense rather than a crime across the border without documentation.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Get To Know The Incoming Trump Cabinet: Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, and More
Well, groupthink is a powerful force. And in medicine, we get sort of medical dogma that takes on a life of its own, and it permeates. And what we develop are these giant blind spots, these areas of medicine and health that affect every aspect of everything we're doing, of every person's health, but we never talk about them.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Get To Know The Incoming Trump Cabinet: Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, and More
The microbiome, the poison food supply, the toxins we're exposed to, the bad recommendations that we put out there. Yes. Yes. So when we use good science in medicine, we can help a lot of people. But when we use the opinions of a small group of leaders and central planners in medicine, where they issue these broad edicts, we have a lousy track record.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Get To Know The Incoming Trump Cabinet: Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, and More
Food pyramid, the opioid epidemic, the obesity epidemic. So we've got to take a step back and actually ask, why is cancer doubling in many areas of GI cancer? My area of pancreas, I'm a pancreas specialist at Hopkins. We do more pancreatic care and pancreas cancer than any hospital in America.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Get To Know The Incoming Trump Cabinet: Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, and More
Never at any point in my 20 plus years there did anyone ever stop and say, why has pancreas cancer doubled in the last 20 years? Now, they're all good people. They're my friends. They're great doctors. But we have done this terrible thing to doctors. We've put them on this war path where all they do is put out fires at the end stage. No one's asking the big questions.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Get To Know The Incoming Trump Cabinet: Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, and More
No one's asking, why has autism been going up 14% each year for the last 23 years? Why are half our nation's children obese or overweight? Why are nearly a quarter of them dealing with fatty liver and prediabetes? I mean, this is... a well-being issue for the country. It's a national security issue. It is a issue of the economy. This entire over-medicated population is a massive burden.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Get To Know The Incoming Trump Cabinet: Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, and More
I mean, a $4.7 trillion economy that's expanding like crazy. And we're sort of told by the politicians that Oh, we were able to get Medicare to negotiate drug prices and save $6 billion in the first year. Okay, that's great, but that's a drop in the ocean. We've got this much bigger blind spot in modern medicine.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Get To Know The Incoming Trump Cabinet: Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, and More
Pharma controls the narrative. They've captured the big health agencies. They've created this culture. First of all, it's very hard to do research unless big pharma is paying for it or the NIH has a designated center. So who at the NIH is interested in the fact that
The Megyn Kelly Show
Get To Know The Incoming Trump Cabinet: Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, and More
sperm counts have gone down 50% in the last five decades, or that the average age of puberty is going down each year, or that kids feel sick more and more, that autoimmune diseases are going up, that attention deficit disorder is now epidemic, or 40% of our kids will have a mental health diagnosis.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Get To Know The Incoming Trump Cabinet: Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, and More
Who at the NIH is gonna study the microbiome, pesticides, heavy metals, the poison food supply, these food additives that are engineered to be addictive. So when you eat them, your appetite increases, even though you kind of feel full.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Get To Know The Incoming Trump Cabinet: Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, and More
And what's happening is all these foreign molecules, these chemicals that are now rampant, including the derivatives of seed oils, they go down the GI tract, which has a lymphatic system, an immune system, in the wall of the intestine. And it's not reacting to these foreign molecules and chemicals with a sudden reaction. It's reacting with a low level immune fighting of this stuff.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Get To Know The Incoming Trump Cabinet: Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, and More
And it makes you feel blah, makes you feel sick. and sad sometimes. And what are we doing? We have told doctors, you only have your medications to do and your operations to do. We haven't given doctors the time or resources or research funding to deal with the root causes. And so they've lived in these blind spots. We never talk about them.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Get To Know The Incoming Trump Cabinet: Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, and More
We never talk about these issues at the top medical centers. Trust me, I've gone as far as you can go in academic medicine. all the accolades and tenure. No one is talking about the biggest issues in health because of these blind spots. I think we've got good people working in a bad system where the culture has said, put your head down, do your job, you'll be rewarded.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Get To Know The Incoming Trump Cabinet: Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, and More
You'll make back all this debt that you got in medical school. By the way, we take these highly creative students out of college. They want to save the world, have big ideas. They're altruistic. Heck, 90% of our applicants or so want to do medical missions, if not full-time. Part-time is a side of their practice.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Get To Know The Incoming Trump Cabinet: Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, and More
And we take these bright, creative young folks and we beat them down with this old baton. guard dinosaur curriculum, memorize and regurgitate, memorize these thousands of drugs and learn to get an eye, a hawk eye for when you can use them. And, oh, there's an indication. Here you go. There's an indication. Here you go.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Get To Know The Incoming Trump Cabinet: Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, and More
We put them on this treadmill where they have 10 minute visits, 15 minute visits, and they're just diagnosing and treating and doling out diagnoses and meds. We've done a terrible thing to these doctors, to these young folks.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Get To Know The Incoming Trump Cabinet: Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, and More
It's a crazy hamster wheel. And I was on it and I got off of it. I said, I'm going to focus on my passion, which is public health research. I had a degree in public health in medical school that I got. I got basically walked away from medicine after three years of medical school. disillusioned. This isn't for me. What are we doing? And I enrolled in graduate school for public health.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Get To Know The Incoming Trump Cabinet: Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, and More
I ended up coming back to medicine. I missed the bedside care and I love being a surgeon. But after being on this treadmill that everybody gets on, I said, no more dangling bonuses at the end of the year. I don't care what my throughput is. The system is designed for throughput and billing and coding.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Get To Know The Incoming Trump Cabinet: Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, and More
Why do you think we have 35% of doctors burn out and doctors are one of the highest professions for suicide? We're doing a terrible thing to these people. And a lot of doctors now are rejecting it. They're saying, we're not going to have anything to do with this. Half of my students at Johns Hopkins don't want to have anything to do with this crazy broken system.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Get To Know The Incoming Trump Cabinet: Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, and More
They don't care about the big pay and the house in the suburb. They want to be a part of something bigger. They want to deal with the root causes. They want to start businesses. They're entrepreneurial. They're getting second degrees. They want to spend time in a Medicare Advantage model where... Basically, they get paid on a lump sum for a population.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Get To Know The Incoming Trump Cabinet: Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, and More
They can spend an hour and talk about the sleep quality of a person that affects their blood pressure, not just doling out antihypertensives. Maybe we need to talk about school lunch programs instead of putting every kid on Ozempic. Maybe we need to talk about treating diabetes with cooking classes instead of throwing insulin at people.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Get To Know The Incoming Trump Cabinet: Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, and More
Maybe we need to talk about environmental exposures that cause cancer, not just the chemotherapy to treat it. We're going backwards. We're watching all of these chronic diseases consume our culture, and we've got to get off this myopic focus. So luckily, good stuff is happening. A lot of doctors are speaking up. They're getting off the treadmill. They're spending time with patients.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Get To Know The Incoming Trump Cabinet: Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, and More
They're coming up with their own models for care, financial models. And a bunch of us docs are going directly to the public to educate them about health.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Get To Know The Incoming Trump Cabinet: Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, and More
Like a bunch of us are trying to give a different perspective than the perspective the food industry and big ag and pharma have been putting in front of people for a long time. Telling doctors, you don't need to look into arsenic levels in the water. The EPA says you can have up to 10 micrograms per liter of arsenic in your water. Where did they come up with that number from? Oh, my gosh.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Get To Know The Incoming Trump Cabinet: Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, and More
I didn't know that. Where? I mean, they're making stuff up. I mean, this is where we get into trouble. This is why distrust goes down in the establishment. So you draw the blood of a baby today through the umbilical cord, and there's 287 forever compounds. How about research on those compounds? How about research on the seed oil derivatives?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Get To Know The Incoming Trump Cabinet: Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, and More
How about research on the pesticides that have hormone effects in children, which may explain the declining fertility and lowering age of puberty? Instead of research on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan and Japanese quail that they give cocaine to when they watch their sexual activity. These are real studies funded by the government. So we have had terrible leaders in the medical establishment.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Get To Know The Incoming Trump Cabinet: Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, and More
And so a bunch of us, Peter Attia, Casey and Kelly Means, Vinay Prasad, Zubin Devani, we feel like now we're going to go directly to public and educate them about the real story on health because there is a huge body of literature on all these topics you talk about, from microplastics to the microbiome. And people need to know about it so they can make better choices every day. Mm-hmm.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Get To Know The Incoming Trump Cabinet: Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, and More
Yeah, we don't want to create cynicism or hysteria. If you have an emergency, do whatever the doctor says. But when it comes to chronic diseases, when it comes to irritable bowel or why somebody is developing autoimmunity, we don't really ever talk about this stuff in medicine. I you mentioned food and nutrition. I gave the keynote speech.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Get To Know The Incoming Trump Cabinet: Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, and More
I was invited to give the keynote speech several years ago at the big nutrition conference. This is the biggest conference on nutrition and doctors for dietitians, for nutritionists and dietitians. And so I gave my keynote speech. Of course, I like to push the field, as you've observed.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Get To Know The Incoming Trump Cabinet: Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, and More
And afterwards, a woman who is from the milk lobby comes and gives me her perspective when I talked about why are we taking out natural fat and adding sugar? Like, what are we doing? We're doing it backwards. Like, there's nothing wrong with natural fat. It doesn't cause heart disease like we thought. Um, and she says they're one of the two big sponsors of the nutrition conference.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Get To Know The Incoming Trump Cabinet: Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, and More
The other sponsor I find out is Coca-Cola. Oh, come on. So this is a, um, people are not getting the real story on health.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
Yeah, I mean, if you follow the guidelines as they've been written to the exact letter, a 12-year-old healthy thin girl should be on her eighth COVID vaccine mRNA booster shot. And so Secretary Kennedy has called for gold standard science. And I can tell you, and Dr. Bhattacharya will tell you the same thing at the NIH,
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
is he has posed questions, but he is not engaging in the details of how rigorous scientific methodology should be conducted. He's posing questions as is most of America right now. Again, I don't think VAERS is a good database because it is self-reported and not rates. On Peter Marks, I can tell you that I never knew the guy, I never met him. He resigned before I came to office.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
Some people liked some of the things he did and some people had concerns with some of the things he did. One of the biggest concerns, of course, was that he pushed out the two top scientific vaccine experts here at the FDA. And this all came out in a House Judiciary hearing last summer. The two top vaccine experts at the FDA were pushed out by Peter Marks. It's not an opinion.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
It's in the congressional hearing.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
Exactly. They had concerns, according to their testimony, they had concerns over the COVID mRNA booster repeat strategy as a mandate in children. And as you know, some people have said it makes no sense. We don't have good data on the risk-benefit profile.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
The two top vaccine career scientists at the FDA, Dr. Gruber and Dr. Krause, head director and deputy director of the Vaccine Research Center here at the FDA, were forced out by Dr. Marks. So, you know, sometimes you have to block out some of the noise where now he's taking, you know, a different view. I never met the guy, but that's... Those are the different ideas people have on people.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
There's a lot of talented people who can do that job well. A lot of very smart people who are right now who are applying for that job.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
We are not going to be shutting down ideas, ideas that may be different from my ideas. We should welcome that. Science is based on challenging, deeply held assumptions where there's no good evidence. what we call medical dogma. That is the scientific process. And so we shouldn't be shutting down other ideas. We should be inviting them.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
And that's why we're going to be having roundtable expert panels, FDA expert panels on menopause and hormone replacement therapy on a whole host of topics.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
Well, we have to do two things. Number one is we have to partner with industry and pharma to facilitate the process, to make it user-friendly and expeditious. We shouldn't be in a receive-only mode. We want American pharma companies to do well and companies that do business in the United States to do well. But the scientific evaluation needs to be independent.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
And that's why today we're announcing we are removing industry members, pharma members from FDA advisory committees. I was shocked when I learned that employees of big pharma companies sit on FDA advisory committees as members of those committees. So we're going to be replacing them whenever statutorily possible with patients and family caregivers.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
We are going to be inviting pharma companies to send representatives to the advisory committees, but they can sit with the rest of the public and watch and pose questions as the rest of the American public can.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
We're stopping that for every committee where we can by statute, and we're replacing them with patients and family caregivers. And the idea is that... There should not be a cozy relationship. There should be a user-friendly process for industry, but not a cozy relationship. Because let's be honest, a lot of people in the United States feel that the system is rigged.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
A lot of people feel that the relationship is too cozy between pharma and regulators. This is an agency that belongs to the American people. And so we can work with pharma and at the same time ensure that scientific evaluation process is totally independent. And on those advisory committees, the pharma and device members of those advisory committees will say that they're non-voting members.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
But that is a sort of a close club of individuals that has a running dialogue and they meet and they become friendly. And it's okay to be friendly, but we need the scientific evaluation, the voting to be totally independent. And so people ask, Are you anti-pharma or pro-pharma?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
And the reality is we're pro-pharma, but our evaluation has to be independent, and we cannot have any more indications for chronic pain written for a drug based on a 14-day study where the regulator then goes immediately and works for the company. That's the kind of thing that breeds distrust, and that's why people perceive
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
that this agency, the FDA, has been captured by industry, and it is not captured by industry. It is owned by the American people right now.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
I don't know. We live in a free country. I do know some of these individuals, and they are good people. And they're all God's children. They're doing what the market incentivizes. But when it comes to their influence on the operations of the FDA, that is something that we cannot tolerate. We cannot have people who leave as regulators go to the industry. And we've thought about an ethics pledge.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
We've thought about all kinds of things. It's non-binding because we live in a free country. You can't control someone after they leave an employer. But what we can do is create a culture here where people want to stay. We can ensure that people who leave don't have undue influence.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
When I got this nomination for the job, I cannot tell you how many lobbyists, former members of Congress, the swamp reached out to me. This is the swamp. I mean, I was in the operating room and the next day I discovered what the swamp was. You were swampy. Surrounded by the swamp creatures. Surrounded by the swamp creatures. And immediately, this is how it happens.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
We want to help you with your confirmation. We want to write a letter on behalf of our company to the senators on your committee. We know these senators. We're going to talk to them if it's okay with you. And you know what I said? Don't talk to the senators. I don't want your letters. They're not for free. Those are obligations that then you feel indebted to return once you're in office.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
And I'd rather not get confirmed into this job than have those obligations.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
Yes. It literally should be nothing political about the FDA. We're talking about values. Look, Republican, Democrat, independent moms came out and voted for President Trump, and they believed in Secretary Kennedy's maha mish.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
There's literally nothing political about looking at the influence of food colors and ingredients and evaluating the grass standard and getting infant formula without seed oil and added sugar and rewriting our nutrition guidelines, which we're doing right now. These are the most apolitical things in society.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
Of course, you're gonna have media try to spin things, of course, but I think people see through that.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
What I don't understand is if there's enough preliminary data to suggest that there may be carcinogenic effects or genomic disruption or associations with attention deficit disorder or a whole plethora of families that are saying, hey, once we started eliminating these petrochemical food colorings from the food of my child, their behavior improved. When you have enough of that, it's not...
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
Look, they're not giant randomized control studies over 10 years for each food dye. We're not going to get that. But when you have enough preliminary data to suggest these petrochemical food dyes are concerning, Who then would conclude, you know what, let's just risk it. It's fine. We'll wing it. The kids may be fine. Why do that?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
When we have all of these chronic diseases increasing right in front of our eyes that were rare a generation ago. One in 22 boys in California now has autism. I mean, when you see these statistics, who says, you know what, it might be some of these ingredients have been suggested. Europe doesn't have them. They don't need them.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
The food prices are not higher because they use beet juice and carrot juice and watermelon juice. I know you had Vani Hari on. She's a great champion for that. We're taking a close look at this, and I think you're going to hear some action in the coming weeks on this.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
We're speeding up the approval process. We made an announcement last week that we are reducing the requirements for some perfunctory things like animal testing. Why are we testing every single drug in chimpanzees and dogs, usually beagles, because they're obedient? That's so sad. It's sad and it's unnecessary. Some of these drugs are already approved in other countries in humans.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
So you have a drug already in use in humans in other countries and we're requiring animal testing before? So we are now, we've put out a release that we are now taking steps to reduce the animal testing requirement. It's cruel to the animals sometimes. It's unnecessary.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
And we live in a modern world where we have computational modeling using AI that can evaluate a molecule and predict its toxicity in humans better than the animal testing. We also have something called organ-on-a-chip technology where, say, liver cells are grown in the lab.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
Yeah, I personally cannot eat liver. I've operated on the liver too much. Oh, God. That's one food I cannot do. No one wants organ-on-a-chip. Yeah, organ-on-a-chip. So in the lab, they grow these cells. and then they introduce the drug. And you can actually see whether or not it injures the cells better than if you inject some bunny rabbit that is not gonna talk to you and say my liver hurts.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
So these new technologies have the promise of replacing some of this routine animal testing. You would cut six months out of that approval process. You lower R&D costs for pharma companies and inventors, which could lower drug prices for everyday Americans. And it reduces animal use. There's too much animal use.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
Yeah, we're bringing in a team that is really exciting. They're going to introduce AI into the review process to help the reviewer, to make the reviewer's work stream much more streamlined and summarize things. There are parts of the drug application that are so perfunctory, that are outdated, that could be streamlined, that could be abstracted with AI technology. to help the reviewer.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
Why does it take 10 years to bring a drug to market in the United States? Because of the regulatory steps. I mean, people are dying. People need cures and meaningful treatments. And my predecessor in this role was focused, as he stated, his number one goal was fighting misinformation. Well, our number one goal is delivering cures and meaningful treatments and healthier foods for Americans.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
That is our focus. And so you've heard about consolidation or changes or cuts at the FDA. Those were not cuts to scientists or reviewers or inspectors. Absolutely none. They were cuts to communications staff, FDA's lobbyists to Congress, and to the IT systems here where there's a lot of opportunity for efficiencies.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
There is a massive growth of FDA employees under the Biden administration. And when the media reports that there were cuts, which many were early retirements, people took early retirement. None were to scientific reviewers or inspectors or law enforcement at the FDA. They were to IT communications, legislative affairs.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
And so what you're not hearing in the mainstream media is that there was a 100% increase in the number of FDA employees since 2006.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
Commissioner. Megan Kelly, great to see you.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
We had 9,500 employees at the FDA in 2006. Oh, wow. And so when you report that there were cuts and you don't report that there was 100% increase in employees in the preceding years, that the number of employees doubled in the preceding years, that is misleading reporting.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
There were no cuts to scientists, reviewers or inspectors or law enforcement and my goal is to make sure that every one of those people has all the resources they need to do their job well. Now cuts are never perfect and so we have done an assessment and there are some individuals that we have invited back.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
There were a couple people who were taking the early retirement, and we were told of their sort of how well they performed here, and we encouraged them to stay. But to not report that the agency has doubled since 2006 before this cut, in my opinion, is not telling the whole story. No, it's dishonest. It's dishonest.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
Yeah, I was in that room. Nobody got up and walked out. Now, we did stream it, so if somebody was watching it in their office and got up to go to the bathroom during the speech, maybe that constituted getting up and walking out. I don't know. I was in that room, and there was incredible energy in that room because he talked about how agencies that are set up to defend public safety
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
sometimes become captured by the organizations that they are set out to regulate. And he talked about the EPA has had a history where they have cycled and at times have been captured by the industry. And he encouraged people at the FDA to speak up, think independently, and that he had his full support behind them. So it was incredible.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
And of course, you're going to hear a clip or a phrase pulled out out of context. But I was in that room. Nobody walked out. It was incredibly a strong message. The FDA is strong. And we're going to continue to be strong. And that's because we believe in the scientists. How's your relationship with Bobby Kennedy? It's good.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
I got to know him during the nomination process, and I found that he always listens to me. He values scientists on questions where he has some skepticism or he has some honest questions that he wants to pose. And I think that's what we need. I mean, first of all, he represents America. President Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
Well, welcome to the FDA, Megan. It's great to have you out here. You know, we are not on a good path as a country in terms of the health outcomes of the population. We do great with sophisticated operations and amazing drugs that can treat certain kinds of lymphoma and other types of cures, but
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
are the two most popular political people in the United States right now. That's polling data. That's not my opinion. That's polling data. And he represents the American people. He has questions. He wants the scientific process to run its course. And so he's posing the questions and he values our opinion. Everything I put before him. He has valued my input on.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
And so we're going to see new studies come out. We're going to talk about chronic diseases. We're going to look at food and food ingredients. And he's provided some really great leadership. Are we redoing the food pyramid? We're redoing the food pyramid. Thank God.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
And no longer are we gonna say, you have to have these calories, it doesn't matter how you get them, doesn't matter if it's all ultra processed foods, it's just pure calories in, calories out. That dogma, which had no scientific support, was a massively underfunded endeavor. We let the industry tell us as a government, what's healthy and what's not healthy.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
And even with the recent Biden administration suggestion to have front of package labeling, they picked sodium, saturated fat, and added sugar in there. I think they got maybe one thing right out of those four, but they ignored a giant sloth of food ingredients. And so when you ignore...
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
a thousand chemicals, some of which are petrochemicals that have been introduced into the food supply simply because the industry has self-deemed them as safe. When you ignore that, then you can't call something healthy just because it has a low amount of saturated fat. That's old dogma.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
Now, people want to know, a lot of parents have been dealing with kids with autism. I mean, one in 32 kids in America today have autism. We can't just keep medicating every kid. It was one in 10,000 in the 90s. It was unheard of. The sort of repetitive motions, the tics, the heavy, the complete nonverbal child. Where did you see that in the 1940s and 50s? And so we have to look at everything.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
And when you do science, you can't say, hey, we're going to do a study of what is causing this epidemic affecting 1 in 32 kids. But when you can't look at these potential causes, that's not how science is done.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
When it comes to the health of the population right now, we have had this massive area that we're not talking about that we need to be talking about, and that is the rise of all these chronic diseases. We've got one in six women now affected with autoimmune diseases. Half the kids are sick. Prediabetes affects about 20% of teens. 70% of kids are not qualifying for the military.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
I don't know what causes autism, but I'm deeply concerned about the rise. If I had to make a hypothesis as a scientist, not as a regulator, but as a scientist, and Dr. Bhattacharya is going to be launching a very impressive study using electronic health big data that we're helping curate.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
I think it is the cumulative burden of all of these exposures, environmental and dietary, that alter the microbiome. Remember, 90% of the serotonin made, which is involved in mood and mental health, is from bacteria in the microbiome. That's where it's produced.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
And when you mess up the microbiome, when you carpet bomb the microbiome with all of these ingredients that don't appear in nature, these are novel chemicals. What are we doing? So we've known for a long time as a scientific community that kids with autism have different stool composition, different biodiversity.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
So when you look at the billion different bacteria that live in the microbiome, there may be an association between changing the microbiome and autism and things that are changing the microbiome that we've not yet fully appreciated. And that could be a whole list of things.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
all of it we have to look at all of it i mean if you look at how much children are suffering they're in pain they're depressed they're dealing with injecting themselves with insulin something you would rarely see a kid have type 2 diabetes in their teenage years a generation ago now you got 20 of kids who have diabetes or pre-diabetes the vast majority are type 2 diabetes right
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
So we've got to start talking about our problems and not just keep throwing medications at them.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
We have only been talking about treating the rise in colon cancer in young people with new chemotherapy. New chemotherapy is not going to address the root causes. We need to do it, and we want to see new drugs come into market quickly. But we've got to talk about what is insulting the microbiome, driving general body inflammation.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
We've got to talk about the two underlying causes of so many chronic diseases, in my opinion, insulin resistance and general body inflammation. And it's all the stuff that we put down. The body's immune system is reacting and causing some inflammation. So we're not just going to be looking at new chemo for colon cancer. We're going to be focused on healthy food at the FDA.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
And we're looking at a school lunch grant program for schools that want to convert to healthier foods but don't know how and they need help. We want to help them.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
They don't know.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
So we are redoing the food pyramid, but this is like the number one issue right now in health in America is people don't know how to switch to healthier foods, right? And I wish, you know, there's zealots in every aspect of healthcare and you hear them, you know, the media gives them a lot of airtime and their issues are legitimate oftentimes.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
But I often look at these zealots and I say, I wish you would take 10% of your enthusiasm over this little issue in healthcare and actually talk about school lunches and healthy foods and educating parents on what to feed their children and sugary drinks that are ubiquitous and microplastics and seed oils and chemicals in the grass and all of it.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
Day 17 today.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
So we're going to see some guidance come out that I think is going to be helpful. So schools that want to convert to healthier, more organic, more local and possible foods don't know how. And they got limited budgets. That's where we can provide some assistance. So on a pilot basis for schools that want to convert and don't know how, we're going to help them get off the cupcakes.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
I didn't realize how many schools feed breakfast to children. Donuts, cupcakes, ding-dongs, French toast, as if it alludes to the French healthy living.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
Right, more sophisticated, right. So this is where the entire medical establishment can pivot and focus on. And you're going to see grants coming out of the NIH. We're working in coordination with the NIH to make sure there's research in this area. You know, the NIH has really... focused on genetics.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
And the entire culture of the NIH and thus the entire academic medical community in the United States has been a culture focused on the genome. Based on the Francis Collins era that the gene is responsible for most of our health problems and the gene can solve most of our health problems. And you look at the NIH individual institutes within the National Institutes of Health
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
Well, I got to be honest with you. I had a lot of emotions the last day I was in the operating room the day before my Senate confirmation hearing. And so it's an entirely different world here. I am on a listening tour. We're talking to the career scientists. We're trying to make sure they have all the resources they need to do their job well.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
And it's geneticists all over the place. You look at the Institute for Child Health, at the NIH. And it's run by a geneticist who parades around finding a gene involved in some ultra-rare gene disorder. That's good and it's important, but nobody is talking about the food our kids are eating.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
The genes are not the cause of our chronic disease epidemic. It's what we're doing or what is being done to children by adults today, unknowingly, with good intentions sometimes. you go to the National Institute of Environmental Health at the NIH. Go to the website, and you'll see the director has on there that they were involved in identifying a gene that may be associated with obesity.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
What are you doing? I mean, there's value in that research. How about the ding-dongs and cupcakes and donuts and French toast that the kids are eating with government tax dollars every morning at school and nobody seems to be paying attention?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
As a surgeon, I've had patients that would do everything to lose weight. They did all the right things. They switched to better foods and they would exercise. They couldn't lose weight. What was happening there? Can we learn from those individual patients? Maybe the microbiome was altered in a way that is not easy to fix by just switching back.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
Maybe all of those years the cumulative insult to the microbiome was altered. Now there are some researchers doing this. I met the microbiome researcher at the NIH and it's like a tiny shop. Like this should be the main focus. Yes. The NIH has collected all the DNA information on 1.2 million Americans. And you'll say, I didn't know about this. Why?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
They have been doing it for the last six or seven years in search of a genetic basis for health disparities. And that entire... What does that mean? It means they want to understand why certain populations have more chronic diseases than others. And they believe that it's in the genome. And so they collected this giant genetic library. They would pay Americans, say, $25.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
80% are African-American, Latino, or transgendered. because they want to unlock why they have different rates of chronic diseases. They have this massive library. When Jay Bhattacharya came into office, the previous director moved that entire database project to another office outside of the director's office, maybe so he wouldn't touch it. Interesting. And what are they doing?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
We're trying to change the culture here to make it more of a teamwork culture. It's been very siloed. Each of the centers has developed their own fiefdom with their own communications department and lawyers and lobbyists for Congress and IT departments. And the IT systems don't talk. They're on different systems.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
I'm not saying there's no value in that, but you can't even tell us how to lose weight. You can't even tell us what foods are healthy for children. You can't even tell us about seed oils or food dyes or ingredients that are added just for shelf life. And so that has been the entire culture of the medical establishment.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
And when they launched that project, they went to the oldest African-American church in Harlem. They went to Atlanta, Detroit, and they recruited people from minority communities. And they told them no longer is our medical recommendations going to be blanket. They're going to be custom tailored to your population.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
I think people are now discovering that they've been duped with an industry that has told them, don't worry, all this food is healthy for kids. It's low in calories. It has low fat. So, you know, go ahead and it's fine. That's sort of the between the lines message. And I think they're very suspicious, and they want to find an ingredient that accounts for the chronic disease epidemic.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
I don't believe there's any single ingredient. I think it's the entire gamut of less exercise, food chemicals, not eating the right foods, micronutrient-poor foods. We have foods now in the United States that are basically grown with caffeine, you know, potassium, phosphorus, nitrogen in the roots. And there's no nutrients. You know, there's a deficiency of good soil.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
And so you get micronutrient deficient food and you can eat a lot. But your satiety, that is your sense of feeling full, is not triggered because you're not getting those nutrients. And so what you do is you have this weird feeling after you eat where you're kind of full and bloated, but you're still hungry. And some of those chemicals make you more hungry.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
The food industry, they're not bad people. They're actually good people. They've done what we as a society have asked them to do, and that is focus on food insecurity and mass production. Now, however, seeing that these chronic diseases have skyrocketed in our country, in our generation, we've got to take a step back and ask, how can we get healthier foods out there?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
God did not make these animals on planet Earth for us to do cruel things to them and subjugate them. It does not seem right. And so we are doing everything we can, and we're taking a lot of steps to reduce animal testing requirements and to stop unnecessary animal testing. A single monoclonal antibody that was developed for approval used 144 chimpanzees in the animal testing requirement.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
So that's why you have VAERS and FAERS and CARES and 10 different adverse event reporting systems. We probably need one really good one. So I'm doing an inventory right now, trying to assess the lay of the land. And then we're also trying to change the culture to a culture of teamwork, the scientific gold standard and common sense working together. And that is our goal right now.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
What are we doing? And these chimpanzees are not... living with great sunlight and eating bananas.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
There is a problem here, and when you realize that the computational models can do as good or better of a job in predicting, when the lab-based organ cells tested, or something called organoids, where you can actually grow an organ in a lab, and it's not a functional organ, but it has the properties of those cells, and you can test liver toxicity or heart toxicity or myocarditis,
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
Those models should be replacing animal testing. So the first announcement we had when I came in as commissioner was to take steps to reduce unnecessary animal testing.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
I'd like to see as much reduction of unnecessary animal testing as humanly possible. As a surgeon, we had pig labs at Johns Hopkins where the students and residents would learn how to do surgery on the pigs. I personally believed it had no impact on learning. They could have learned from simulations, computerized simulations. They can learn from watching us in the operating room.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
It provided no edits because they were unnecessary. And every week or so, they would have pigs anesthetized in this big production. It was expensive. And in my opinion, it was unnecessary. We've got to modernize.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
Will there be more cuts? There are no plans for any mass cuts. Now, if somebody has not logged on to their VPN in two years, we don't want them working. If somebody's doing an incredible job, and we measure performance down to 15-minute increments with reviewers that are doing scientific reviews, the reviews are highly tracked.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
And so if somebody's doing a good job doing that review, we want to encourage them and support. It's hard work. Doing the reviews is hard work. And so we want to do other things here at the FDA to support a great culture. Scientific forums, speakers, roundtables. We want to encourage them to spend some of their time doing creative work.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
And so we're doing a lot right now to create more of a teamwork culture and less of an individual siloed culture that is the culture that I walked into.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
There are some of those folks here, but, you know, they're all God's children and I hope to work with all of them. So, you know, that's my job as a leader to try to win their confidence. And I hope to do it by upholding my mission to put out there gold standard science and common sense together. We can do both.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
healthier food for children, rebuilding the public trust, and focusing not on the peripheral distractions, but focusing on cures and meaningful treatments for Americans. And when this is done, is there a chance you're going to a drug company? Zero chance. In terms of if there's an inventor that I might have the chance to work with, I have no idea.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
When it comes to the large pharmaceutical companies, I'm not auditioning for a job with them. At the same time, I love them. I believe in love thy neighbor. And I hope we can work with them to create a great user-friendly process to chop down that 10-year time frame to an approval to a much shorter time frame. And I'm committed to work with them to get that down. I can't wait to see what you do.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
Thank you so much. Thank you, Megan. Thanks for being willing to do the job. Thanks for being a champion for my moms.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
We need both. We need somebody who is a highly sub-specialized pancreatic specialist. We need people who think broadly and think functionally and think about the fact that 90% of type 2 diabetes is curable by changing what you eat. Changing what you eat can actually...
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
take care of a certain type of rash that somebody develops, almost as good as some of these expensive biologics in certain circumstances. So we need people who think differently. We need fresh new ideas. We need the old guard to ensure that we hold to rigorous scientific methodology, and we need fresh new ideas at the same time.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
So we're trying to bring all of that together now, and people have forgotten that the F in FDA stands for food. And so that is a major focus with Secretary Kennedy in this administration.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
Well, I mean, we're still reeling back from some of the disastrous health care corruption that the government was involved in. The food pyramid, one of the greatest pieces of misinformation put out there that has informed school lunch programs, that has informed what people define as healthy. And so we now have a group that's reevaluating the nutrition guidance.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
We have a Maha commission that is going to be putting out a massive report That doesn't just talk about calories in, calories out. It talks about food ingredients and chemicals that don't appear in nature that are going down the GI tracts of our nation's children every day, nonstop. And it may not be one ingredient that is driving some of these chronic diseases.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
It may not be one ingredient involved in attention deficit disorder. It may be a cumulative burden of all of it. So we're now taking a much wider view. And you mentioned the opioid issue. That probably is the quintessential example of what's wrong with a cozy relationship when the regulator agency is captured by the industry.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
The person who literally authorized OxyContin then went to work for Purdue Pharma. Curtis Wright. Exactly.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
Sweetheart deal. And that label was illegal, in my opinion. It was it was an indication for chronic pain for around the clock, long term use. And it was based on a 14 day study. And so that kind of mistake can result in a million Americans losing their lives. And when you don't have good post-approval monitoring, as this agency has not had, you discover things decades later.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
We discovered Vioxx killed maybe 38,000 plus Americans years after it was approved. We discovered a million Americans died of opioids and overdoses. over a decade after the OxyContin label was given, why weren't we monitoring in real time people who were getting it immediately after approval? In part, the answer to that question is we couldn't do it. We didn't have the data.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
It was too sophisticated. You'd have to have everybody registered in a study. Now we have giant big data from electronic health records nationally. Now we can have our researchers and universities go in there And look at everyone who's taken a new medication, match to somebody who's similar who is not taking that medication. And look at the adverse event rate and ask, is it working?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
Is there a safety signal? When you don't do that, people get suspicious. And they are suspicious about the cozy relationship sometimes that results in approvals. And they're also suspicious when they hear stories and they don't have hard data. You don't have great rates about certain complications when you just have self-reported data. Self-reported data is terrible data.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
That's right. And in the void of good scientific data, every opinion fills that void. So we can do a better job. And if we have good post-approval monitoring of drugs and devices, then we can also tell companies, hey, instead of doing two randomized control trials to get your drug on the market,
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
How about one, and we'll take a close look in the post-approval monitoring, how the drug is doing in real time immediately after it's approved. And that's particularly important when you're talking about rare diseases. When you talk about a genetic issue that affects 52 kids in the world, and that's a real thing. There is a condition that affects 15 kids. That's also a real thing.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
You can't expect the companies to do a randomized control trial. You'll kill innovation. You'll kill investment in those innovative ideas. You've got to say... Hey, this is a very difficult condition. It's incurable. It's fatal. It's a permanent disability. We're going to customize the approval process to the condition.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
And so we're going to be rolling out a new pathway for drugs, which is a pathway based on a plausible mechanism. If there's a rare condition or a condition that's incurable, that affects a small number of people, we may be approving drugs based on a plausible mechanism on sort of a conditional basis. What does that mean? Put that in normal speak.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
Let's say there's a condition that affects 75 people in the world and there's a new treatment that makes sense physiologically. The mechanism is scientifically plausible that this treatment would help these individuals. No one's forcing these medications on these individuals.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
If they want to try these new medications, even though we don't have a randomized controlled trial because it's not feasible, we will allow that and at the same time monitor everybody who gets it so that we can make inferences as soon as the data speaks with a signal in the data. Wow.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
There's been, look, let's be honest, there's been an epidemic of distrust, and part of it is warranted. And when you don't want to look at complications, the complication rate looks lower than it really is, and it makes products look safer than they really are. And so in the case of VAERS, you have something that could suggest It's a screening tool. It could suggest that there's an issue.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
But you have to do a rigorous evaluation. If you don't follow up with a rigorous evaluation, that screening tool is not very useful.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
Exactly.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
We're gonna know, we're gonna do intense comprehensive research and that's why if we have massive electronic health record data, which we now have through something called the Health Information Exchange, we can have researchers go into there and look at real world complication rates. So we're not relying on self-reported data from which you can make no inferences about rates.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
That's just a basic scientific methodologic principle. When you have a couple people saying, hey, I had this or I had this, you can't infer what the rate is, that is, the frequency per unit time. But when you have comprehensive data, which we only have now because of cloud storage ability, we couldn't do this 10 years ago, we have now tremendous big data where we can go in there and look at
The Megyn Kelly Show
Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051
Here's 100,000 people who took this product. Let's follow them in the data, de-identified to protect privacy, and look at how many people came back to the hospital. Not just came back to the hospital with myocarditis coded, but who came into a clinic and said, my chest hurts. Once you have good methodologic capture of outcomes, now you're looking at real rates.