How America went MAHA
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What are the key arguments made by RFK Jr. regarding health?
Did you say Lyme disease is a highly likely militarily engineered bioweapon?
Is Lyme disease a military bioweapon according to RFK Jr.?
I probably did say that. Kennedy makes two big arguments about our health, and the first is deeply divisive. He is skeptical of vaccines.
Well, I do believe that autism does come from vaccines.
Science disagrees. The second argument is something that a lot of Americans, regardless of their politics, have concluded. He says our food system is serving us garbage and that garbage is making us sick. Coming up on today explained a confidant of Kennedy's, in fact, the man who helped facilitate his introduction to Donald Trump, on what the Make America Healthy Again movement wants.
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You're listening to Today Explained. Callie Means is an informal advisor to RFK who went viral on Twitter about two years ago with this explosive claim. Callie had worked as a consultant for Coca-Cola, and he said that he'd witnessed Coke give millions of dollars to various groups to ensure that sugar taxes failed and that soda was included in food stamp funding.
What is Callie Means' view on the food system in America?
The NAACP took millions of dollars from Coca-Cola to say that we should maintain Coca-Cola on food stamps, which is just an absolutely insane public policy because that's literally poisoning lower-income kids with a supplemental nutrition assistance program.
Callie went on to co-author a book with his sister, Dr. Casey Means, called Good Energy, and he founded a company called TrueMed. Today, he maintains deep skepticism of big food and big pharma, and he contends that these industries have economic incentives not to make Americans well, but to keep us sick.
In hindsight, what I saw is that the healthcare system is working to propagate a system where more Americans are sick and to perform interventions on those Americans, not to cure any disease, but manage it. And that's 95% of our medical spending. 95% of our medical spending is management of chronic disease. So examples of that are in this invisible hand at work where I don't even think people realize what they're doing is working for Coca-Cola, funding millions of dollars to the American Diabetes Association. I saw that. So why is Coca-Cola funding the American Diabetes Association?
How does Callie Means describe the healthcare system's role?
And why would the American Diabetes Association be accepting money from Coca-Cola when we have a diabetes crisis among children when it's liquid diabetes, it's high sugar drinks? Right. So there's actually this interplay between our food system, our ultra-processed food system that's getting people addicted, that's getting people sick, and then a healthcare system that stands silent. So that's on the food side. On the pharmaceutical side, it's the rigging of institutions. The pharmaceutical industry is the lifeblood of institutions. of academic research and the NIH and the federal bureaucracies just by definition are a revolving door, an orgy of corruption between industry and government. I mean, 11 of the 12 past FDA directors literally left the FDA and the next day walked into a pharmaceutical office. I had a list of Stanford and Harvard professors that we were going to funnel money to. These aren't apparent corruption. It's rank corruption. And I saw that.
Kelly, what do you hear as the main pushback against you? What do your critics argue?
Well, they resort to ad hominem attacks. If you really stay on these unimpeachable messages, I think they're pretty hard to disagree with. It's a demonstrable fact that our scientific and healthcare agencies are co-opted. 75% of the FDA department that oversees drug approvals is funded by the pharmaceutical industry itself.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What are the key arguments made by RFK Jr. regarding health?
0:10–0:16
2
Is Lyme disease a military bioweapon according to RFK Jr.?
0:16–1:58
3
What is Callie Means' view on the food system in America?
1:58–3:07
4
How does Callie Means describe the healthcare system's role?
3:07–5:50
5
What are the economic incentives of the pharmaceutical industry?
5:50–6:18
6
How does Callie Means address criticism of his views?
6:18–12:38
7
What are the implications of RFK Jr.'s views on vaccines?
12:38–13:58
8
How does political corruption relate to health issues?
13:58–24:04