Food: The Root Causes of Our Healthcare, Economic and Social Crises with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Coming up on this week's episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

We know it's not genes. Genes do not cause epidemics. They can provide a vulnerability, but you need an environmental toxin. Our kids didn't suddenly get lazy. You know, we are mass poisoning our children.

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Great to see you again. How are you doing?

Hey Mark, where are you? I'm in La Paz in Bolivia, 13,000 feet. So hopefully I haven't oxygen in my brain into this conversation. We just came out of the Amazon.

And, you know, I've been down chilly with you. I think I talked to you about that before that I, because you and I visited Peru together. But I had lived my senior year in high school for half the year. I lived in, in Iloáve, which is up in the altiplano in Peru with a Indian tribe, the Aymaras. And it was 14,000 feet. And it, it really does a lot of weird things to your, to your body and, you're everything.

Well, hopefully I have an auction to have this conversation. But I wanted to talk about your position on health. You're one of the few candidates out there in the presidential race, probably the only one who's focused on improving the health of America by not just having access to health care, which we all have, but really addressing the root cause of why our health care system is so screwed up, why America is so sick, why we're so overweight, and what we can do about it. So I'm excited to talk to you about a lot of this because we've together done a lot of physical activity. We've rafted down rivers, we've hiked mountains, we've done a lot of fun stuff and we're always doing active things and fitness is a really key part of your life and your work and it's actually how you maintain, I think, your energy on the campaign trail. So, I want to sort of start by kind of laying out a little bit of the landscape of what we're facing and why we really need to double down on our thinking about the health of America, which really affects our global standing in the world, our economic competitiveness, our productivity. And right now we're screwed. I would say we're seeing 75% of Americans overweight, 45% of kids according to new data, 93.2% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy, which means they have either high blood sugar, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, or overweight or have had a heart attack or stroke. Six in 10 Americans have a chronic disease. Large part, this is due to the explosion of ultra processed food over the last 20, 30 years that drives poor metabolic health. It's also affecting our mental health crisis, increasing a lot of our depression, anxiety, polarization, violence, aggression, all because of the food we're eating. And the cost is staggering. As president, you have to deal with our budget and $4.3 trillion are spent every year on health care. Now, $1 in $5 in our economy. And it leads also huge amounts of lost productivity with billions of dollars a year in lost productivity. And what's really frightening, Bobby, is our life expectancy is going down with the largest year-over-year drop in the last two years in our history, which is far below all other nations. And we're more than 60 on the list of life expectancy in the world. And what's really also, as I begin to look at this data, it was really interesting. We have a wealth gap in this country, right? A 39% increase since 1980, meaning the rich and the poor have about a 39% spread since 1980. but the death gap has increased 570% since 1980. And it's worse in the South and the Midwest, which are mostly red states because of increasing rates of diabetes and obesity. And our government policies don't address this. In 2021, the GAO, the Government Accountability Report on Chronic Disease and Nutrition found over 200 policies, 21 agencies on nutrition working mostly across purposes, making America sicker and increasing health care costs. Like on one hand we say, with a dietary guidelines, don't eat sugar, reduce your intake of all that. And on the other hand, with our SNAP or food stamp program, 75% of the food is processed, ultra-processed food, 10% is soda, meaning $10 billion a year on soda. So, you know, we're in this situation where even the FDA commissioner, Robert Califf, has said, our life expectancy is going the wrong way. We're the top health official in the country. We don't fix it who will. And you also talked about this. You were quoted in the Washington Post where you said, if we had a regulatory agencies they were interested in actually looking at data, we will be trying to figure out why all cause mortality for Americans has increased. They're not COVID deaths. So we don't really have a healthcare system, we have a sick care system. And those who profit most, big ag, big food, big pharma, they just perpetuate that system that benefits from chronic disease, which is horrible. So would you consider this a national emergency? And as president, how would you begin to really address this problem?

Yeah, this is one of the reasons, the key reasons that I ran for president, Mark, to end this chronic disease epidemic and to restore Americans to good health. When my uncle was president, in 1960, he was, if you go back and look at his speeches and his thoughts back then, and he was extraordinarily distressed at that point that we were losing control to Europeans, And if he could look at Americans today, he would be in shock because we are so sick, as you say, the obesity during his, when he was in office, obesity was at 13%. Today it's at 42%, 45% now, 75% of Americans are overweight. When he was in office, 6% of Americans had chronic disease. By 1986, 11.8% so it had doubled between 1960 and 1986. It's 26 years. By 2006, it was at 54%. And we don't really know what the numbers are right now because of, I would say, purposeful data chaos that comes out of NIH that they will not give us. straight ways of measuring baselines of understanding, you know, why health care, why public health is declining so precipitously in our country. And, you know, it's clearly these are epidemics. The epidemics we're seeing epidemics of all these chronic diseases, not only obesity, neurological diseases, ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, tics, Tourette's syndrome, narcolepsy, ASD, autism, all of these diseases that you and I never heard of when we were kids.

There was that one troubled kid in the class and now it's like half the class, right?

Yeah. I mean, autism has gone in one in 10,000 in my generation. So 70-year-old men, one in 10,000 have full-blown autism. And by that I mean non-verbal, non-toilet-trained, stimming, toe walking, hand flapping. You don't see the people like that my age, but one in every third, according to the CDC, one in every 34 kids looks like that. What's happening? One in 22 boys. And then we have the, the autoimmune diseases. It suddenly blew up in the early 90s. Juvenile, juvenile diabetes, which I never saw when I was a kid, rheumatoid arthritis, and they did all these exotic disease like Crohn's. disease, lupus, and then the allergic diseases that suddenly appeared at the same time in the mid 90s, peanut allergies, food allergies. I had anaphylaxis, eczema, whoever heard of eczema? Nobody. And now all these kids have it. They're all scratching, they all have the rashes, and we have it. And then, you know, they're all medicated. they got, they're taking Adderall, they're taking antidepressants, they're taking Ritalin, they've got their albuterol inhalers in every classroom. They've got EpiPens in every classroom. And, you know, there's, there's a study then that Congress asked EPA to do, and EPA is captured agency, but it's captured not by the pharmaceutical industry, and it's not really heavily captured by the agricultural industry because it doesn't really directly regulate those. It's captured by oil and coal and gas and chemical. But Congress said to EPA, tell us what year the autism epidemic began. So EPA actually did a real study with real science, and the scientists came back and said, 1989, that was the change year. So, you know, the challenge is, and if you look at all of these diseases, they follow kind of that same timeline. Also, what happened in 1989? What happened in the early 90s? We know it's not genes. Genes do not cause epidemics. It can provide a vulnerability, but you need an environmental toxin. Our kids didn't suddenly get lazy. you know, we are mass poisoning our children. And so you have to figure out a toxin that was introduced, became ubiquitous in the, you know, 1989, the mid 90s, and that affects every demographic from Cubans in Key West to in Alaska and Homer, Alaska. and, you know, and there aren't that many candidates. One of them is high fructose corn syrup, clearly all these processed foods that, you know, my generation began eating. I mean, we were eating, oh, it's just Twinkies, by the way.

You know, I like those cupcakes. I used to go to the corner store in Queens and get them.

I wish I had a dollar for every one of those that I ate. Before I met you, of course. I'd still eat them if I could.

Well, you're good. You listened to me, Bobby. You stopped drinking soda. You did a good job. You got fitter. Actually, since I met you 15 years ago, you actually are fitter and better shaped than you were back then. It's impressive.

I was drinking nine Cokes a day. I actually, I have this app called Days. I'll show you that. It says 3,057 days, that's without a Coke, without any soda.

Yeah, that's amazing. That's about how long I've known you a little bit more. It took me a while to get you convinced.

That's almost 10 years. And I was drinking a lot of Coke. I was drinking like eight or nine Coke a day.

Yeah, so you're right, Bobby. The ultra-processed food is a huge issue. It's exploded in the last decades. and it's really been one of those inciting factors that's driven our epidemic. And I think we're looking for a smoking gun.

This is ice, David, no sugar in it.

There you go. Thanks, Bobby. But, you know, we really have, you know, smoking is an easy, literally smoking gun, and it's linked to lung cancer. And so in food, it's been very difficult because it's like, what food should it be? Pat, sugar, or salt? But I think that what we're coming to understand in science, there's a huge body of evidence now that supports this. is an ultra-processed food, which is really defined by this NOVA classification that degrades food on how processed it is. Tomato can is processed, but it's minimally processed. Whereas, Twinkie is extremely processed and it's made up of deconstructed food ingredients that are originally food, but then they deconstruct it into molecular science projects and then reassemble them to look like something you could eat, but they're not really food by definition. And, that has been driving the epidemic of obesity, diabetes, all these chronic illnesses that destroys our gut microbiome, it drives inflammation, it affects mental health. it's linked to depression, suicide, violence. It's quite interesting. And it also has increased mortality. For every 10% of your diet that's ultra-processed food, your risk of death goes up by 14% and 60 plus percent of our diet is adults and 67% of kids diets. And I think, I think how would you think about addressing this as president? Because we are, in my view, we're seeing like a slow moving tsunami. We're all getting our suntan on the beach and this is coming at us so fast and we're really now going to see in the next generation, the serious consequences, because our kids, like you mentioned, are all coming into adulthood sick and overweight and on lots of medications.

Yeah, I would, you know, my inclination is to give people good information and at the same time maximize freedom. So I wouldn't tell people what to eat and what not to eat, but what I would tell people is, I would. I'm going to take the NIH and bring it back to its original Mission. And let me. Let me explain that. When I was a little kid, NIH was the gold standard scientific agency on Earth, just like NASA was for space, you know, but. And I. When I was a little boy, we only. We lived in McLean, which is only a few minutes from Bethesda, Maryland. and my mother had an assistant who worked for her. Her husband was a scientist at NIH. You know, I used to go down to NIH because I was fascinated by science. And I would go and look at the guinea pigs and the rats and the mice and all the things they were doing. And, you know, during that period, Mark, we had, there were a lot of new countries that were beginning. There were 122 new nations that began after World War II, and a lot of more African and Colonial Nations. that got their sovereignty. And they didn't have the money to have a real scientific agency. A lot of them in their constitutions and their statutory framework would say, if FDA approves it, if NIH says it's true, then we will consider it true. So they didn't even have their agencies, but they relied on ours because everybody trusted American science. And then something happened to NIH and, and a whole bunch of, it was a lot of corporate capture, all these mechanisms of corporate but most importantly, in 1980, the By Dole Act was passed, and that act gave NIH and NIH individual scientists the rights to collect royalties on any drug that they worked on. So, for example, today, the Moderna vaccine was produced by NIH, and it's made tens of billions of dollars. Well, half that money will go to NIH.

Yeah.

And some of that money goes to scientists who work in, there's six scientists who get to collect 150 000 a year forever. Well, of course, if you have those kind of perverse economic incentives and conflict, conflicts of interest, it is going to subsume the regulatory function. And, you know, and beneath the kind of mercantile Ambitions of those individuals who can make a lot of money. If you're made, if you're paying for your boat and your alimony and your, and your and your house and your children's education, a drug that you're supposed to be regulating, you may turn a blind eye to some of the problems with that drug, and you may do everything you can to get it through the regulatory process and get it mandated. And that's what's happened. But not only that, the entire function of NIH has changed. So that, I think it was 2016 or 2017 when I actually did this calculation that was, 220 new drugs approved by FDA and all of them have come from NIH. So NIH is now the biggest incubator of pharmaceutical products. And what's happened is they're no longer doing what they're supposed to be doing, which is to answer the question, why do we have an autism epidemic? Why do we have an obesity epidemic? It's pretty easy to figure out. yeah, there's only a certain number of suspects. You know, you have processed foods, the pfos, you have, you have neon nicotine pesticides, atrazine, glyphosate, cell phone radiation. There's a limited universe, and you can figure out pretty easily which ones are causing which effects. And it's probably cumulative. So they're all probably working on the, on similar biological Pathways and hurting our kids. you can figure out that too. NIH does not do that science. In fact, if you try to do that science, let's say you're a university young associate professor at Stanford, and you say, hey, you know what? I have access to the vaccine. I have access to the California or the Florida health, health care records. So I can look at exposures that people made and then subsequent medical claims, whether it's vaccines or, you know, your food diet. You can look at all that. I'm going to study and find out why do we have an autism epidemic? Why do we have an obesity epidemic? If you try to do those studies, you could easily jeopardize your job in your future.

We call the NIH the National Institute of Health, but it's not really. It's diseases and it's focused on, on.

The root causes, which is really unfortunate. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go down to NIH during my first week in office, and I'm going to assemble all the division chairs and the branch chairs, and I'm going to say to them, we're going to do something different. We have a NIH as a $42 billion annual budget. It distributes that money to 56,000 scientists, mainly at universities. to develop new drugs and to do studies. I'm going to say we are going to make it our priority now as fast as possible to fund studies that are going to tell us what's causing this epidemic. And then I'm going to get those studies funded and I'm going to get them underway, every way of looking at them. I'm also going to call in all the scientific journals into the Justice Department. and I'm going to say to them, you've been serving the interest, you've been lying to the public. You are representing yourself as a neutral and reliable source of health information, and you have done tremendous damage to public health because you're not, you are not that. You are publishing thing, you are publishing so fake science that is designed to to promote the mercantile Ambitions of the pharmaceutical industry and, and of the, and of the food industry, of the big agricultural interests of the oil and gas and coal and all these other big, powerful Industries. And, and, and you're lying to the public, and you've caused tremendous damage to Public Health. And I'm gonna hold you responsible. I'm gonna I'm going to litigate against you under the racketeering laws, under the general tort laws. I'm going to find a way to sue you unless you come up with a plan right now to show how you're going to start publishing real science and stop retracting the real science and publishing, you know, the fake pharmaceutical science by these phony industry mercenaries, scientists that we call biostatus. that's what they publish in the New England Journal of Medicine. The Lancet, you know, e-Biopharma, all of these other big publications, Elsevier, and I'm going to straighten that out so that people can actually get real information. The other thing that that's going to do, Mark, is it will give the attorneys a chance to litigate these issues in court because there's no good science on these issues. You can't sue a company for making your children fat, for poisoning them so that their microbiome doesn't work anymore. Once you create that science, once you have 15 or 20 studies that show that, then those kind of suits become possible. And that's how you really change policy, just like we did with the Monsanto case. We got a critical threshold of studies. animal studies, observational studies, epidemiological studies, bench studies that showed that glyphosate was causing non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in Roundup. And before that, if you were president of the United States and you tried to ban Roundup, you would go nowhere. It doesn't matter who you are. But if you have enough science to get past the Daubert threshold, which is a threshold in federal courts that where the judge has to make an independent judgment that there's sufficient science, critical mass of science, 15, 20, 25 studies out there that show the link between this exposure and this illness. Yeah, that's called Albert. And the judge is not allowed to send it to a jury until you have that package of science. And if what I'm going to do, I'm going to provide that enough science, sufficient science on each one of these exposures and each one of these injuries. to show who's causing what and hold them responsible in court.

I think that's so important, Bobby, because, you know, this has been so neglected in the National Civil Health budget. There's really almost nothing for nutrition research, which is the biggest driver of so much of the things we're talking about, the chronic illness, the Obesity, the diabetes, the mental health crisis. And, yeah, there are other issues you mentioned, environmental chemicals, various kinds of stresses and so forth that are there, things like glyphosate affecting a microbiome. But the ultra processed food is, is something that we really haven't double down and study. And it's driving all the other diseases. So at the NIH, they study cancer and they give you 6 million for that or heart disease or diabetes, but they're not studying the root causes. And I think in medicine, we're really so focused on the downstream things that we can treat with the medication rather than the upstream root causes. And it's going to require a fairly rigorous approach looking at one, the science and two, you know, why, why are we actually promoting policies even with the science that we have now, which shows the damage of ultra processed food where we're paying, I have our $1 billion a year SNAP bill, which is a food stamp, that most of that is for junk food and ultra processed food, which we know is killing people, and 10% of soda, then we're paying for that on the back end with Medicaid and Medicare for all the chronic disease. We're also seeing the challenges of the capture of not just the agencies like the FDA and USDA and HHS and EPA and CDC, but also Congress. I sat down with the congressman the other day who got excited about what I was talking about. I met with them about our food fix campaign to try to transform our food system and actually have reimbursement for nutrition, health care, and many other efforts. And he lost 25 pounds by following the suggestions I made. He cut down sugar. I said, why don't we do a sugar detox for Congress? Well, I can't really do that. I'm on the candy caucus. I'm like, oh, my God. Now, like, everybody is, is unwilling to actually step up and do the right thing because of this. And I wonder how we begin to address this corporate capture because we have all the agencies not coordinated around food, we have all these things siloed, it's affecting every area of our society and we're dealing with all things separately. We're dealing with the issue of chronic disease and with medication or Zempick for obesity. We're dealing with the economic deficit and our national debt by talking about how we cut tax, cut ex spending and increased taxes and all these things without talking about why we're having this, right? One to $5 of our economy is from chronic disease, mostly preventable through lifestyle. We have to start with with those root cause things. Hey, everybody, it's Dr. Mark. 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That's F-A-T-T-Y-1-5 .com and now let's get back to this week's episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. So how would you think about, you know, dealing with this corporate capture process, which is affecting our health and our healthcare?

Well, I mean, I think there's a number of ways to deal with it. One is what I said before is to make sure they're producing good science and then you have a market response. You know, you once you get good information to the public, you can have a market response to bad food, the bad, you know, to tell people, you're not helping it to tell mothers, you're not helping your mother, your children, feed them Froot Loops. You don't, you know, you're not, it's not, you are not doing what a parent ought to do to give your kids dyes and, and sugar, you know, a mixture of dyes and sugar with, and, and high fructose corns there. Yeah.

Right now, I'm in South America, Bobby, and all the labels on the foods, they're all clear. Green is good for you, yellow, caution, red, this is bad for you. And anybody can understand that even if you have no education. Currently, our FDA labeling is so confusing, you have to be a nutrition PhD to understand it. And even then, you can't really get it. So, we have to change labeling, we have to change marketing, we have to change research infrastructure, we have to change how we're reimbursing healthcare services to incentivize doctors. and healthcare providers to provide nutrition services and deal with the root causes. And right now, we don't do that. You can get paid for doing a stent, but you can't pay for doing an intensive lifestyle care program like we do at Cleveland Clinic, where we're reversing diabetes, reversing heart disease, reversing these chronic illnesses using food as medicine. So it seems to be one of the central things that we can do to radically shift our trajectory in America, which is, you know, like I said.

We'Re, I think, 60th or worse in our life expectancy despite spending twice as.

Much as any other nation on health care.

Yeah. I mean, and then the other thing I'm going to do is just to change the corporate culture at these agencies and that is going to require a president who actually understands how the agencies work. I've litigated against almost all these agencies against NIH, CDC, FDA, EPA, FCC. I recently won a case against FCC in the Federal Court of Appeals. are lying to the public about cell phone radiation. I'm involved in litigation right now involving Dito, DOT, Department of Transportation, because I'm representing a thousand families in East Palestine, Ohio, whose lives were abandoned by the Norfolk Southern. All of these problems, you know, on all these agencies are coming from corporate capture. And I know how to unravel it. I know in many of these agencies who the individuals are. I can name them. off the top of my head, who are putting corporate capture on the steroids. I understand the perverse incentives that also amplify corporate capture. Why does FDA get 50% of its budget from pharmaceutical companies? Why can NIH scientists get royalties on the products they're supposed to be regulating? Why does NIH get royalties on products it's supposed to be refining problems with? you know, it's just a, it's a, it's a bribery. It's a, it's an eternal loop of bribery, of corrupt bribery. Oh, I, you know, and I'm gonna go to these agencies. I'm gonna pick people. Instead of picking, like, you know, Donald Trump promised that he would unravel the swamp. But then he, he appoints John Bolton to head NSA, who is, you know, who is the face of the military industrial complex. you point Scott Gottlieb, who's a part, a business partner of, of Pfizer to run FDA.

And then he went back to work for Pfizer afterwards.

Yeah. Well, FDA does an 88 billion under him for Pfizer. And then he goes back to work for Pfizer again. So it's a. Alex Azar is another, you know, lobbyists from the pharmaceutical industry. who gets appointed to the head of NIH. And you look at all of the regulatory agencies, they were all being run by people who were within those industries. And I'm not going to do that. I'm going to bring people of integrity into government. And, you know, who will change the culture of those agencies and reward the branch and division chairs that actually are doing public health. And I'm going to get rid of I'm going to change some of the policies about the revote that allows these, you know, I think the last six FDA chiefs have gone to work for pharmaceutical companies within a year of leaving the FDA. I don't know.

It shouldn't be called the FDA, Bobby, because it should be called the Federal Drug Administration, not the Food and Drug Administration, because 7% of the budget is on food. 93% is on pharma. And, you know, food safety is what they're looking at, which is whether you get salmonella or food poisoning. And that's about 2,400 people dying a year. We have more than that dying every day from eating our, our, what we call standard American diet or sad diet, our ultra processed diet. And they're not doing anything about that. The labeling is horrible. The regulation of chemicals and food, ultra processed food is not there. We have the data and they're not acting on it. And for me, as a doctor, seeing these people, in my office, and I've been a doctor for over 30 years now. And in my own career, my own life, I've seen this explosion of these diseases that you mentioned at the onset of the podcast, from all the obesity and metabolic diseases to the environmentally related diseases, neurogender diseases, neurodevelopmental diseases, autoimmune inflammatory diseases. These are things that didn't exist at their volume that we have now. And, and the FDA is really not addressing this. And our NIH is not addressing this. And our, our health care system itself is incentivized to actually make more money doing more stuff rather than making people healthier. I mean, imagine if you had a car that you drove off a lot and you had to pay for the car and it didn't work after you drove it off a lot. That's essentially what we do with, with our current healthcare system. We don't pay for results and outcomes. We pay for doing more stuff, more surgeries, more medications, more doctors visits, more hospitalizations, and that, and that's got to change.

And, you know what? Another thing that we can do is, you know, I, and I'm saying this with a due concern for privacy or individual privacy, but you can depersonalize medical records and digitalize. A lot of them are digitalized anyway. Once they're digitalized, you can do a medical informatics system that essentially is constantly doing epidemiological studies on every drug and comparing, you know, one diabetes drug outcome to another diabetes drug outcome and then saying we're only going to pay for the one where, you know, we maximize the bank for Buck. and none of that happens. There's none of those kind of, you know, everything, everybody is the mercy of the pharmaceutical reps. You know, the doctors are prescribing what they tell them to prescribe. And, you know, the public is at the mercy of an FDA that is owned. You know, the FDA is just a sock puppet, and the industry is supposed to regulate and. you know, I, the, all of this is easily changed. You know, I'm not saying it's, you know, I, I'm going to be able to accomplish it all on day one, but I'm going to accomplish it very quickly. And I, you know, what I've said to people, if I haven't dramatically reduced the occurrence of chronic disease in children by my third year in office, that people shouldn't vote for me again. you know, I'm that confident that I'm going to be able to change this. Yeah, it's true.

It's not, it's not a lack of knowledge or knowing what to do. It's really a lack of the political will, a lack of the, the right incentives in business, a lack of awareness and education, the public, and we can do that. And we've done it before with smoking and other campaigns that have been effective in reducing that. And I think, you know, I don't know if it's gonna require litigation against some of these corporations that are doing harmful things. I think no one intends to, but the downstream consequences, unintended consequences of this ultra-processed food explosion is something we can't ignore anymore. And I'm really proud of you, Bobby, for actually taking us down on this because I've been very carefully listening to the political narrative for decades and I've never heard any presidential candidate actually talk about these issues. It's almost like, let's get some Medicaid for all or let's restrict Medicaid or let's limit this or limit that.

Not talking about the real root causes. yeah. And, you know, that debate between, you know, Medicaid for all or, you know, whether there's a public-private, you know, a public option or a gradual integration or, you know, whatever it is, Obamacare, it's all about moving deck chairs around in the Titanic because, you know, the thing that's driving costs It's shifting costs from one person to another. Is it, you know, who's going to pay the cost? It's going to be the doctors who pay the cost, it's going to be the hospitals who pay the cost, it's going to be the HMOs, the pharmaceutical companies, the government, who's going to pay it? That's the only debate that's going on. And what we should be saying is how do we reduce the cost so it's more in line with the healthier countries in the world? We pay $4.3 trillion for healthcare. dwarfs when anybody else pays in the world per capita. We're paying two or three or four times what other, what European nations soon were getting worse outcomes. Where I think I read one, you know, there's many ways of calculating where we are in the world. You say we're 60th in life expectancy. There's other indicia that you look at child, infant mortality, maternal mortality. cancer has chronic disease. But by one of these, you know, reasonable metrics, we're 79th in the world in healthcare outcomes. Yeah. In Mongolia, in Cuba, we're behind Costa Rica. Yeah. And, you know, and we're supposed when I was a kid, we had the best health care system in the world. People came all over the world to see American doctors. But more importantly, that level of health care was available to every, you know, class of Americans. So, yeah, we have some good specialists here now, but the care that Americans get when they are sick, if they get any at all, is some of the worst in the world. And we have the highest chronic disease burden on earth. Nobody has a chronic disease. And, you know, this is, The COVID epidemic was really a bellwether for us. It was an eye-opener because we had 16% of the COVID deaths in this country. We only have 4.2% of the global population. So why did we have so many COVID deaths? Well, one was just terrible mismanagement of the COVID epidemic, including denying people access to therapeutic drugs that were proven to work. But more importantly, we had the highest chronic disease burden. So CDC says that the average American who died from COVID had 3.8 chronic diseases. Yeah. Oh, and that it was the chronic disease that was killing them.

Obesity, chronic disease.

Cut them to the top of the cliff, dangling the cotton top of the cliff, and then COVID stepped on their fingernails and made them fall. they were already hanging off the cliff. And, you know, and that's what, you know, nobody is explaining that Anthony Fauci, who was running the system for 50 years, ran it in the ground, was getting all these awards for managing COVID. He's never explained how under his watch, allergic diseases, which he directly is in charge of, exploded from, from essentially zero to, you know, you know, a large percentage of the American population have them now. And, you know, I, I, as I said, we spent 4, 4.3 trillion on, on health care in this country. When my uncle was president, six percent of Americans had chronic disease. Now we don't know, but probably around 60, which is the number.

It is six in 10 or more. and 40% have more than one. It's a problem.

And, but even larger percentage are healthcare. I think it's 93% of Medicare costs are chronic disease and something like 85% of Medicaid. Yeah. If we can get rid of chronic disease, we can solve our healthcare crisis in this country, which is also the economic crisis. But the second biggest cost to America is the military, which if you include national security and veterans benefits, 1.3 trillion a year. Well, this is 4.3 trillion. So it's basically more than three times what the military cost. It's by far the biggest cost we have. We want to reduce the budget deficit. We got to start with even more important. If we, you know, it's highly likely in, you know, the next 20 years, we're going to face some catastrophic crisis in our country. It could be an economic meltdown, it could be a war, it could be, you know, environmental injuries, catastrophes, whatever. We're America. We can weather any kind of storm. we have our, you know, what our entrepreneurial impulses, we have the greatest natural resources in the world. We'll figure out a way around it. You know what? What Franklin Roosevelt called America's industrial genius. But as long as you're healthy, we can figure it out. But if you got a chronic disease or if you're caring for a child with full-blown autism, that reduces your productivity to probably 10 or 20% of what it would normally be. And you will not have, you will be soul crushed and destroyed. The key is, you know, the most important key more than our economy or anything else is to get Americans healthy again so that we can be resilient and that we can cope with these kind of crises.

I think you're right, Bobby. I think you hit the nail on the head. You know, in COVID, you mentioned COVID, 63%, according to a tough study of deaths in hospitalization from COVID could have been prevented by better diet because diet was driving these chronic diseases. And, I think until we really take a grip of that fact that food and our food system is driving so many of the things that are wrong with our society, we're not going to get out of this mess. We're going to be just sort of putting, like, you know, putting, you know, a thumb in different holes in the boat while the boat is sinking or rearranging the textures of the Titanic, you know, for example, for every dollar we spend on food, according to the Rockefeller Foundation study, there's three dollars in collateral damage to increasing chronic disease burden, to the impact on social environments, to the effect on environment, biodiversity, our depleted water resources, our soil depletion, the climate change, all these downstream effects because of how we grow food, how we process food, how we market food, distributed, eat food, all those things are things that are not being dealt with as a problem. They're just sort of dealing with all the, the things Downstream, like we're doing in medicine, you deal with diabetes or heart disease or autoimmune disease or medication instead of dealing with the root causes. So I'm really so excited to hear you talk about this, because I think the, the, the only way for America to succeed going forward is that, is that we don't become burdened from this product disease epidemic that will affect every aspect of, of our ability to function in the world, our productivity. I mean, just, just when you think about the mental health crisis, I don't want to talk about this for a minute because I think it's very connected, and I think that most people don't understand why we're seeing such increasing rates of depression, anxiety, suicide, where we're seeing increased polarization, divisiveness with society. And, you know, I dug into this research quite a lot. I wrote a book about this 15 years ago called the UltraMind Solution, which is how our body affects our mind and our brain's functioning. And, and when, when we are inflamed, literally, and our brains are inflamed, it leads to all these things that we've been talking about and everything from autism, ADD to anxiety, depression. and even things like Alzheimer's. So the brain's inflammation is what's driving so many of these brain disorders. And the productivity of people who have depression is the biggest cost. It was a macroeconomic analysis that was done that showed over the next 35 years, the direct and indirect costs of our healthcare crisis are going to cost $95 trillion. And the bulk of that wasn't people with diabetes or obesity actually, it was the mental health crisis. It was depression, which resulted in the indirect cost of lost productivity, which is trillions of dollars a year. So, you know, I'd love to talk about this mental health crisis. I sent you a sort of a literature review that I did of how our food is affecting our brains. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on how we begin to sort of deal with this. It's not just, it's not just obviously food, but it's also increasing isolation, loneliness, the endless amount of bad news we're.

Seeing and other stresses. So how do you begin to think about tackling this mental health crisis? Yeah, I mean, and I've also read a lot of science on the link between the microbiome and mood and brain, mental health and mental illness. And, you know, it's absolutely, you know, one of the things that I'm doing is one of my, my kind of Peace Corps initiative is going to be launch a series of wellness centers in communities all over this country, particularly in rural communities today. Rural communities, the biggest industry is often prisons. And, you know, prisons is when we get, get the kids when they're too late, prison, suicide, Etc. So I'm, that's when it's too late. What I'm going to do is launch these, these essentially Wellness Farms, although I'm doing them in the cities as well. I just toured one the other day in Utah that is just fantastic and so inspiring. But they're modeled on a program that I saw in Italy that I visited many times called San Padre Ninos. And San Padre Ninos is a farm, 500 acres. It has vineyards. It has a winery where the people who, anybody can go there if you're addicted to drugs and, and, or alcohol and you can go there, you just have to make a five-year commitment and you go there for free and you learn a trade. So in five years, sounds like a long time, but we send our kids to college for four years and, you know, this is better than college for a lot of kids. They, there's no screens there. oh, there's no cell phones, there's no computers. You need. It's like old school. You need to start talking to other people. And there's not a big medical infrastructure, psychiatrist and everything. It's really. You get re-parented by your peers. You know, there's. There's codes of conduct, and. And they grow organic food. They eat very, very good food. They grow their own. You learn to people. some groups will learn to farm. There's a dog kennel where people learn to train animals and care for them. There is a factory for furniture where people learn that trade. There's an apparel factory. There's a wallpaper, hand-painted wallpaper factory. And these are old artisans who teach people under the medieval feudal apprentice system where you apprentice under somebody who's an accomplished artist. They may they make purses for de la Valle, for Prada, for Gucci. They make some of the best wines in Europe. They make their Bakery, make some of the finest breads in Tuscany. They're famous there. And it's, and it's all free. And, you know, we need to be doing things. You go there, you live in nature, and you get reparented. I was talking the other day to Olympic skier or snowboarder, gold medal, three-time Olympian, gold medalist, Harb Rite. And we both came from big families. And we were talking about the fact that when, you know, if we were left inside with my brothers and sisters, it was like a Donnybrook. There'd be fistfights and, you know, we had real fistfights when we were kids. When you know my family, it's a real fight on each other. As soon as they sent us outside, we'd all be best friends again. And, you know, there's something about nature that does that, that gets you centered and it gets you, you know, it gets you back in connection with larger concepts, with, you know, your spirituality.

Yeah.

And something peaceful and we need, and, you know, that's what I hope to do with these. arms, put people in nature, give them something. You, you get esteem, self-esteem by doing esteemable things. But, but just as importantly, to have them raise their own food, organic food. And, and, and, and, you know, Christopher Oliver Anthony, who, you know, did that, that famous song about Richmond from Richmond is partnering with me on this.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. And we're, I'm very, very excited about it because we need to start healing this country in so many ways, not only the political divisions, our children are in crisis. We lost 110, 000 kids last year to drug overdoses. That's twice that we lost in the, in the 20-year Vietnam War. So, you know, there's a war now on our children, and we need to, you know, we made a big investment in these kids. We need to get them back. and my program is designed to, you know, instead of making foreign wars, we're going to, we're going to bring the kids home. You know, I'm for freedom, Mark, so I'm going to, you know, I'm going to lift the federal regulations against sales of marijuana. The states are doing it all anyway. The federal government ought to be able to tax it. and I'm going to use the taxes from the, that, you know, from sales of marijuana, which is, you know, a drug to, to fund a program to actually heal kids from drug addiction, from alcoholism, from the, from suicide, mental illness, and, and eating good food is a critical part of that and getting people in the habit of eating good food. And I love what you're seeing now in Bolivia, where you're seeing those, you know, the, the color coded yeah. You know, the color-coded food labels. So people know I'm eating green. I'm eating red. Yeah. Eating blue. And to give people of all classes, of all languages, a comprehensible way of saying, I'm gonna only feed my kid the good foods. I'm gonna feed him bad foods.

Yeah.

And it will instead of it uses the economy to incentivize. incentivize companies to make food that actually makes you healthier because there's gonna, there'll be a, you know, we're not gonna regulate it. They don't need more regulations in this country, but we're going to inform the public. And then we're going to use, I'm going to use the bully pulpit of the presidency, the moral suasion of that to tell people if, you know, you're a mom, your duty, your kid is to feed them good food. Don't feed them the yellow foods. Don't feed them the red foods. Yeah.

What do you think, Bobby, about the, the marketing of junk food and stuff on TV and also Pharma? Those are the biggest advertisers on Pharma. And I think we're in New Zealand are the only ones who allow pharmaceutical advertising, I think, which is driving so much of the, our health care issues and also food advertising.

I'm going to end pharmaceutical advertising on TV with the food advertising. You know what I'd like to do, but this will take legislation.

Warnings like they do at the end of drug ads, right? This could kill you.

You eat the Froot Loops and, you know, you're, and you're, you're not, you're boy, you're, you're poisoning your child. So, you know, yeah. Warnings. People should have informed choice, and they don't have a choice. They have propaganda, and that's. It essentially is a lie. It is.

I also think that, you know, that's important people understand that so much of behavior is driven through marketing and advertising, whether it's on TV or online, and it's much more sophisticated, much more targeted now. And kids are predominantly targeted. I think there are over 5 billion embedded ads in games on Facebook for kids that were actually promoting junk food and processed food. Today, our kids schools are the biggest fast food system in the country. If you combine McDonald's, Starbucks and Subway, our food system schools provides more junk food than all those combined. And it's really, again, driving so much of our mental health crisis. You know, we didn't see this when we were kids, Bobby. I didn't see kids with depression, anxiety, and the mass was an ADD and trouble. with school and in the school lunches have really have shifted into be basically outlets for fast food companies. How would you begin to think about that? Because I think that's contributing both to the poor health as well as the as the the mental health crisis we're seeing.

I mean, that's actually something that the Department of Education has a $80 billion budget. And that's one of the things that it ought to be doing is to make sure that school lunches are healthy. and that the food that we're giving to kids is directly related to their behavior, to their moods, to their performance in school. And, you know, to be able to tell people that you're much more likely to have kids who are in a learning atmosphere if they're not pumping up on sugar between, and, you know, and all of these other poisons between classes that are, that are making them behaviorally, you know, that are ruining their moods, their behavior and their learning capacity.

Bobby, there was a school in Washington I heard about that was really interesting. It was a charter school started by a very wealthy guy, and it was really for kids who were underserved, who came from poor socioeconomic environments, who were often going to be more likely to end up in jail than go to college. And what they did with these kids was they not only just had a great academic curriculum, but they fed them three meals a day. The kids ate three meals of whole healthy food a day. and these kids do so well, they're going to Harvard, Yale, all the Ivy League colleges, they were succeeding. And then all the parents of the wealthier neighborhoods wanted to send their kids to the school because they're all having such high performance standards on testing. And I think in terms of research, we should be doing that research on what happens when you take school and this one school gets this typical standard school lunches, which is fully junk food and sugar versus a whole foods lunch and breakfast and dinner for kids and seeing what the different academic performances is, behavioral issues are. aggression as in schools, what their other issues are on ADD and allergies and autoimmunity, all these things we're seeing, it would be such a simple thing to do, but we've never done it. We've never asked those questions. So, I get very excited when I think about you starting to do these things with NIH. In the NIH budget and their whole 100 plus page budget, food was only mentioned once, and that was in the context of the Food and Drug Administration, which just makes me kind of crazy because it's the biggest thing actually we can do to make a difference in our country's health.

Yeah, I love that idea. I love, you know, the idea of being able to, I mean, to me, Mark, as you know, kids are the biggest, you know, kids ought to be the focus of everything in this country. We shouldn't be, you know, talking so much about going to war in Ukraine. It's 113 billion dollars we're spending in. We've already committed to the Ukraine war and where you know, President Biden wants to bring that up to 200 billion. Entire budget for EPA is 12 billion. Entire budget for the CDC is 12 billion. Imagine if we had that money instead of spending it on weapons and wars and, you know, making war in another country. What if we brought it home and made a war on bad health? made that the target and made our children healthy again. How much better off America would really be if we were giving kids three meals a day in school. They were good food and that, you know, we had, we had good education. We have, you know, let's put them, apply the market to our education policies as well and you know, and, and, and allow charter schools like that. That are, if the, if parents want to send their kids to another school, they ought to have a right to have a better school. And there are, there are places where, like, they're, they're connecting the schools with.

Farms and local rural communities that are trying to grow healthy food, and it's actually activating rural communities, which are on the decline. They're, they're struggling. They're, they're, the farmers are going out of business to become a bankrupt. up their suicides. So creating an agricultural system that's designed to actually produce better food will also help, you know, create all this downstream benefit of improvements in our children's health, on our health and better quality food, and also restore rural communities economically and socially, and also have downstream consequences for the environment, which you've been working on your whole life, like better soil and less use of water and less use of chemicals and better effects on helping carbon capture with the soil, all from actually doing the right thing. Right now we're doing all the wrong things and creating all these downstream consequences. And that can be flipped on its head. And we can actually, I think even, you know, activate people to be engaged in farming like, you know, Roosevelt did with the New Deal. He had this conservation corps and all these people who are underemployed or are unemployed and activated them to actually be part of the community. I think Ron Finley did this in LA with food, with the food forest where he got more people who are homeless or just got out of prison or were prostitutes and started bringing them in and teaching how to garden farm in South Central LA. and they're actually creating amazing amounts of food for their community and doing a lot of things that could be done in actually activating our society to be more engaged and connected to each other.

Well, I agree with that. I'm going to enlarge AmeriCorps to do exactly that, to give kids another option.

And.

To go work on farms and grow organic food and care for the elderly and to get outside and do environmental repair. and all of the things that actually make people happy.

Yeah, it's so great, Bobby. So as far as, you've been sort of on the campaign trail, you've been talking about these issues, you also are a symbol of health. When I met you, you were reactive. It was like in your early 50s, now you're about to be 70, and you're always active, but your diet was a bit worse. We didn't fix that up. But now you're out there pounding the pavement, you've got tons of energy, we're seeing all these Instagram videos of you doing 24 pull-ups, all these push-ups and incredible bench presses and leg presses. How do you think about fitness in America and how do you do it for yourself so that you stay committed and engaged? And how has it impacted you?

I mean, I have a couple of thoughts on that. I think people need to do what makes them happy, but we all need to stay in good shape. And that's important for not just ourselves, our individual lives, our satisfaction, our relationships, with our family. But it's also important for our country to reduce the health care costs and to make sure that we're there, that we're, you know, in good shape to serve the public and to serve our community. Oh, it's kind of a social obligation to try to keep yourself in shape. But whether you do that like I do, I do hike it. I hike every day because I want to be outside. and that gets me centered. Then I spent a half an hour in the gym every day. And that, you know, for me works for other people. It may be yoga, it may be swimming, it may be running, whatever it is. But you have to be disciplined about it. And that, you know, discipline is important. It's how we're not here to be. Be building a big pile for ourselves. And whoever dies with the most stuff wins. we're here to build something that's much more enduring than wealth, and that's character. And the way that we build character is by making commitments and then keeping them. And, you know, so for me, you know, I don't like going to the gym. I don't enjoy it. You know, I don't. It's not something that I look forward to, but I do it every day, whether I want to or not, because I made a commitments to myself, and I'm just gonna keep that commitment. I, I, for me, it works to go to limit it to 30, 35 minutes because I, I can never make the excuse. If I had, if I had to go for a full hour a day, there's times where I could say, I just can't do that. You can always find 30 minutes, you know, to do something. So I, I try to, I keep it short deliberately. I, I go in, I work really hard for 30 minutes, and then I get And I've been able to do that now for two weeks, I'll be seven years old. So I've been able to do it for most of my adult life. I've done something like that. And, but I think, you know, for me, look, I have seven kids. I just came back from 10 days of skiing with them. And I'm able to generally keep up with them. and they're all very, very good skiers. I'm gonna go.

Very good. Yeah. I've been skiing with you guys.

I'm doing a political trip this week to Hawaii, and I'm gonna be. My son Finn is gonna come with me, and we're gonna serve together. So I can do that. I can go hiking every day. I can do, you know, I can play volleyball with them. I can. Some of my kids like to play tennis, and I. I can do that. I can stay on a tennis court with. and I can be active and keep up with them, and I can go camping and, you know, and so I. I want that in my life. I don't want me. I don't want to be sitting on a couch for the rest of my life, you know, with the remote control in my hand, fighting with my family about what to watch.

You know, because.

I want to watch the History Show and the nature show, and they want to watch something else, and it's not a good thing for me to be sitting there. about. And so, but being outside is, and being active, you know, for me, it just makes me happy. And I, you know, I want to be where I want to watch my kids grow up and it also is.

Great for helping you with obesity and mental health, too. Right. So it's really has so many benefits personally and for your health and, and for your fitness.

And I'll tell you what, Arc. I don't like eating healthy food. I'm going to tell you. I've eaten your food, you're a great cook, but you need, if you don't have a live-in cook, it's a lot of this stuff. I don't know what it is. I was thinking this before when I was talking to you. Why does this stuff that tastes the best, why is it so bad? Why are Twinkies so bad for you? Why did, how did Evolution equip us to crave Twinkies and McDonald's french fries and, and Big Macs when they're so bad for you? It's, I guess, I can tell you why.

I can tell you why. The, the food industry is designing these foods to be addictive. They, they talk about the mouth feel and the Bliss point of food, and they know actually have, they've tested this, looking at functional MRI, so they know how to activate your dopamine centers, just heroin or cocaine or nicotine or alcohol. And they actually now by strict criteria according to a recent study, 14% of adults and 12% of kids meet the strict criteria for food addiction and leading to all the same symptoms if you had like food, alcohol addiction. And then alcohol addiction is about 14%. So it's a big issue. And we're designed evolution from an evolutionary point of view to find and eat as much sweeter sugar things as we can because it makes us store fat and gain weight for the winter. And animals do that, bears do that. I went to Adam of the Island in Alaska and at the beginning of the season, the bears are all eating salmon, protein and fat and they're not getting that much weight. And then at the end of the season, they're eating berries and they gain 500 pounds. They become diabetic and hypertensive, but then they sleep it off. We just keep eating all winter long. And I think our bodies and brains are designed to actually crave those things which are going to make us gain weight, which is a good thing if there was a time of scarcity and starvation, which is most of how we evolved. But now we have an overabundance abundance of food. We have an overabundance of ultra processed food. And in one study, I know, I don't know if you know about the study from the NIH, they gave people ultra processed foods to eat as much as you want, and they gave people whole foods to eat as much as you want. Same people, they did a crossover trial. But when they had the ultra processed food, they ate 500 calories more a day because the body doesn't register as being satisfied eating that food. Like, no one's gonna eat a bag of avocados, but anybody can eat a bag of chips or bag of Oreo cookies, right? Because, because it, the way it affects the so I think this is part of the issue is we have to start to recognize the science behind why these foods are so addictive, why we crave them so much, and to actually start to regulate these things so that we actually educate people about this process, about what's going on with their brains, why they can't keep their bodies healthy and why they're in this vicious spiral. And the Ozempic craze this year is driving me crazy because it's like, well, if we just give everybody Ozempic who's overweight in this country, obese, I mean obese, it's gonna cost almost half of our entire healthcare budget, right? If we give everybody who's overweight, it's gonna be far more than the $4.3 trillion that we spend now. So we have to think about how do we change this? And I love your talking about this, Bobby, because unless we take this as a national emergency, in my view, unless we take this head on, we're really gonna be unable to have a successful future as America. Everything else we wanna do, our success as a country economically, our success as a country to develop science and intellectual endeavors and to make progress is all gonna be hampered if our bodies and brains are deteriorating because of what we're eating and the lack of our overall wellbeing and health.

Yeah, I talked to you about that one time, 'cause I was talking about that, you know, I could take a mason jar, gallon mason jar full of honey and I could eat it and then I could do that every day for the rest of my life. And I said, why do I, why did evolution hardwire me to want endless amounts of honey if it's not good for you? And you said, well, in the wild, when we evolved, it was really only available on these rare occasions when we stumbled on a beehive, you know, and brave the bees. There was a huge cost to getting the honey because you had to get stung 500 times no, and, but we did it because, you know, it tastes good, it's worth it. And it's usually they have that big Hive at the end of the, you know, they, in the Autumn, that's when they're maxed out on honey production. And that's when he want to start storing fat for the weekend, for the, for the winter. So that craving was actually served the biological for the winter. It's a good idea. so, yeah, it was a good thing. But if Honey is available every single day of your life, it's not going to be good for you. And the same with sugar. The fruits only were, you know, bloomed. The only access to sugar was, you know, fruit. The fruit only bloomed, you know, at the end of the summer when you were storing weight again, and you couldn't get it all year. So it's okay to Crave it all the time because you couldn't get but now that it's available all the time, it's it is a problem. I just came back from Africa, Bobby.

I visited the Hadza tribe, the hunter-gatherers, and 20% of their diet is actually honey. But they're thin and they're fit and they're diabetes. Why? Because they're eating 150 grams of fiber a day from all the tubers and the roots and all the wild plants they're eating. We in America eat about eight grams of fiber per day per person, which is nothing. And that fiber is so important for our microbiome. It's so important for reducing absorption of sugar. and so you can actually eat more sugar carbohydrates if you have a very high fiber diet. It acts like a sponge. And that's part of the problem with ultra processed food is no fiber in there. There's very few nutrients. There's mostly, I don't even know what you, what you want to call, I call Frankenfoods. And they, they, they actually are depleted, they're depleted. And most Americans are nutritionally deficient in Omega-3s and folate and zinc and magnesium and vitamin D and things that we should be getting from our food, but we and so all this creates this dysregulated eating and dysregulated brain chemistry and dysregulated mood. And it's really not that hard to fix. I've seen it over and over in my clinic at Cleveland Clinic, in my own practice. I've seen it with so many people, my patients, and it doesn't take that long, you know? And I think people can do a reset and see their bodies change very quickly. And I think, you know, we should call in America to do a sugar reset or a 10-day diet reset to actually get people to try it, see what it feels to just shift their body into a metabolic and brain chemistry state that isn't hooked into this system. You know, I just came back from, you know, 10 days in Amazon with no phone, no computer, no technology, and no Wi-Fi no cell phone, emfs anywhere. And I slept so much better. And I wasn't, my brain wasn't always, like, looking at my phone and in this state that it often is. And I think those kinds of things really are, are fixable if we take, take a stand and I think, you know, I'm wondering, you know, what else you think for America we could do to make ourselves healthy.

I love that. I love what you're saying about the 10-day sugar detox. And, you know, I'm going to challenge Americans to do that. I, you know, that sounds like such a good idea. My uncle, when he was president, he came across a letter from a series of correspondence between the commandant of the, of the Marine Corps and, and Franklin Roosevelt, in which Franklin or Teddy Roosevelt, this, like 1903. And Teddy Roosevelt was saying, what, what is the, you know, what is the basic physical requirements for Marine? And the command of the Marine Corps said they have to be able to walk 50 miles a single day. And I think it was to 30 pound pack or 40 pound pack. And so my uncle then said, sent that correspondence to the current commander of the Marine Corps. And he said, can Marines today do that physical accomplishment? And the Marines didn't have that kind of structure anymore. And my uncle then challenged the country to do a 50 mile walk. And he came to his cabinet meeting and he said, And the cabinet, he said, at least one of you guys has to do the 50 mile walk. And it was clearly intended for my father, who is, you know, the youngest. My father ended up doing it. It was really hard. I ended up doing it when I got out of college. I walked from Boston to Cape God.

Amazing.

It took me 17 and a half hours and I was really, I don't know, shot. I'm tired, almost crying at the end of that. But I remember I was at Camp David when my father came in, you know, from his 50 mile walk. He was. He walked on the C&O Canal Towpath where the mules used to go to, you know, tow the barges from Washington, DC to Camp David. And when he came in, he had blisters on his feet, and he was. He was the most tired I've ever seen. and I remember my mother massaging his feet. And, but, you know, I like that kind of challenge. My uncle also did the, you know, the presidential Council on Physical Fitness, and we, at high school and grade school, we would get prizes for, for doing a certain amount of pull-ups certain, I won the presidents. prize on physical fitness when I was in, you know, fourth, fifth grade. No, maybe it was fifth, sixth grade. And, and, you know, it was a challenge. And he, and he, he focused on that and got Americans to focus on it. He believed that America had, you know, we were the home of the free, the land of the brave. We were supposed to be the toughest people on Earth. You know, we were American Wilderness had made us beef jerky tough. And now we were all getting soft. And he was really, really distressed at that, that, you know, this softness that was coming out of Mary. And if he looked at what we looked like today, you know, it would be a catastrophe. He would. He just, he'd consider it a natural catastrophe.

You know, Bobby, you're right about this. And I think you're talking about the Marines and their Fitness. I'm not sure where this, but there's a group of over 700 retired Admirals and Generals are talking about our problem of mission readiness in the fact that 70% of military recruits get rejected because they're overweight or unfit to fight. And then when we had school lunches started, it was because during World War II, so many kids were malnourished and they couldn't join the Army or the Navy or the military. And so we started school lunches. And now those same school lunches are actually making the kids so unhealthy that they can't actually get in the military even if they wanted to. And I don't know if you know this, but we saw 72% more evacuations from Iraq and Afghanistan because of obesity related injuries and problems than from in military than from war injuries. That's just staggering to me. And that was from this report from the retired admirals in general. So I think we want to reduce our military, obviously, we want to end forever wars. We want to not be constantly building up the military industrial complex. But just that fact alone of what we're doing to our kids is just staggering. I think that this physical fitness, health, nutritional fitness is so important. And it's got to be, it's got to be something that is a central part of our, our strategy as a nation going forward to actually do whatever else you want to do. Like, we can't be a successful nation if we're all going downhill, you know? Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I'm gonna get the country back in shape again. I'm gonna. Yeah.

So we'll do it. I'm gonna go a fitness challenge and a diet challenge, a sugar challenge.

I like Yeah, we'll do a diet challenge, you know, all of these toxic exposures that are destroying the health of our kids. I'm gonna do everything I can to eliminate them and I'm gonna do it. I might not be able to get every single one of them, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna start down that path and I'm gonna eliminate a lot of them. I'm gonna, we're gonna have a healthier population very soon after I take the local office. That's great.

I mean, I know we talked about this, but I'm going to put a link in the show notes to how people can get a chance to take a hike with you and I up in the hills of Los Angeles near our house, which was so fun. We do that a lot when I come to LA. So I think we're going to try to get people involved and connected and understand why it's important to support these kinds of ideas in the political discourse that we're not seeing anywhere else. So, Bobby, thanks for your dedication to making America healthy, making America really an incredible nation again and stop this slide into our what feels like our decline of the American dream. So, thank you for just being so dedicated. I encourage everybody to check out Bobby's website, kennedy24.com, see his campaign platforms. It's not just health, it's many, many other things. And, you know, don't listen to what you hear in the news. Do your own homework. Listen to what he says. read what he's talking about. And I think very few people out there are willing to take on what he's taking on in terms of the thinking that needs to be done to change our government in a way that actually brings us forward to a healthier and happier future. So any last thoughts or words, Bobby?

Thank you very much, Mark, and thanks for being a champion.

Well, I wish I could be your birthday in a couple of weeks. I'm going to be in trekking in Patagonia. near where we were rafting.

But I wish I was rafting with you in Patagonia.

Yeah, it's more fun than a big birthday party inside, right? And definitely we'll keep people up to date. We might have you back on the podcast and talk about things as we go forward. But it's been great having you and thanks for keeping up the work you're doing to educate America. But what we need you to go forward to a healthier, happier nation.

Thank you very much, Mark. Thanks for everything you do to educate the public and to get us healthier.

Thanks for listening today. If you love this podcast, please share it with your friends and family. Leave a comment on your own best practices on how you upgrade your health and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And follow me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. And we'll see you next time on the Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into the Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you to all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter and in it I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays. Nothing else, I promise. And all you have to do is go to DrHyman.com/picks to sign up. That's DrHyman.com/picks, P-I-C-K-S, and sign up for the newsletter and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health, where I'm the chief medical officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guest opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only. It's not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast has provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner now. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who is trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health. Keeping this podcast free is part of my mission to bring practical ways improving health to the general public. And in keeping with that theme, I'd like to express gratitude to those sponsors that made today's podcast possible. Don't forget, there's a way to listen completely ad-free. With Hyman Plus on Apple Podcasts, you can enjoy every episode without any breaks. Just open Apple Podcasts and tap Try Free to start your seven-day free trial.