The Dark Side of Mr. Beast’s Jerky Partnership

Look, I like Mr. Beast. My 12 year old daughter loves watching Mr. Beast. He's funny, generous, and he's done real good in the world. Curing blindness, digging wells, planting trees. He's the Willy Wonka of YouTube. If Wonka handed out insulin with every chocolate bar. But now he's teaming up with Jack's Links to sell jerky sticks. Look, we're living in an epidemic. Not a boredom or bland snacks, but of obesity, diabetes, and teens having heart attacks. For the first time in history, parents are sometimes outliving their kids. And not because of accidents or genetics. Every health expert says the same thing. Too much processed meat, sugar, and garbage food. So what does Mr. Beast do with his hundreds of millions of fans, many of them kids? He sells them candy bars and processed meat tubes. What next, Mr. Beast? Branded vape pens and deep fried soda? I get it. Capitalism's gotta capitalize. But just maybe if your audience is mostly children, don't build your brand on food that's slowly killing them. Here's a radical idea. How about promoting food that doesn't send your kids to the cardiologist before prom? So I hate to seem like a skull. I like Mr. Beast. I have a lot of respect for certainly what he's done as a business, as a creator. And his stuff is captivating. And look, I want him to make money. And he certainly doesn't seem to be someone wildly greedy. By his own accounts, he plows back the money he gets and puts it into more content. He does not seem like someone who's primarily driven by greed. But I do worry with what I see, with all the health statistics of kids being in the worst shape of, of any generation, it's just not at all uncommon to see kids with diabetes, heart attacks, their own parents outliving them. And this is for two main reasons. One, people are eating garbage. Two, they're not exercising at all. Now, I'm not blaming Mr. Beast for not selling gym memberships, but chocolate bars, hamburgers, and now these beef jerkies. Now, apparently this brand of beef jerky is a lot better than others. And apparently it does have less of the chemicals and the preservatives that others do. But still, it is processed meat, which any nutritionist, and I'm not a nutritionist, but any nutritionist in the world will tell you the last thing we need to be encouraging people to do whether their kids are of any age is eating more processed meat. That message of, oh, it's cool to eat processed meat is reducing life in the United States. I'm old Enough to remember when things like obesity were very rare. When I was a kid growing up, 60s and 70s, I mean, we're talking like 1%, even being overweight was relatively rare. And these days, it's a majority of kids are overweight. Certainly in a majority of Americans are overweight. 70% of Americans are either overweight or obese. And diabetes is just exploding. Well, if you're eating processed meat, feastables, chocolate bars, more hamburgers, and I guess you can't get Mr. Beast hamburgers anymore. That particular business didn't really work out too well for him. If that's what you're eating, then yeah, obesity, diabetes, heart attack, stroke, early death. That's your future. And I understand Mr. Beast is spending a lot of money creating these epic productions, and many of them are fantastic. And I also understand you can't just go to the Broccoli foundation and say, hey, I'm going to promote broccoli. Get me $20 million for my next video. The Broccoli foundation doesn't have that kind of money. The Eat Salad with Good Olive Oil and Vinegar foundation doesn't have money to give for ads for Mr. Beast. So how do you do it? I don't have the answers to all of this, but I really hope that Mr. Beast can somehow create new products that are not fueling the number one health problem in the United States and indeed most of the developed world, which is we're killing ourselves eating processed food, eating garbage all the time. Have I ever eaten a chocolate bar? Sure. Have I ever eaten a hamburger bar or beef jerky? Yes. It's not about being perfect, but it is about where are we spending most of our attention? What are our most powerful voices in society communicating? And Mr. Beast is a powerful voice. He's a lot more powerful than I am, that's for sure. And he's using his megaphone for something that's fundamentally not good for kids with these products he's creating. And again, you could say, well, but, tj, you're not being fair. These beef jerkies or these jerky sticks are better than that. Okay? That's a relative thing. But I defy you to show me any expert who says, well, the problem with kids today is they're not eating enough processed meat. I defy you to show me one expert who says that, yes, there are many nutritionists and doctors who do recommend eating meat. And I eat meat sometime, but not processed meat in the form of jerky. That's just not good. And when you package that with more chocolate bars, Feastables chocolate. It's going down one particular path. It's the profitable path. And maybe there's going to be a Mr. Beast style Coca Cola next. But I would urge Mr. Beast to spend some time thinking about what a powerful communicator he is. He does seem to be a reflective person, thinks about this stuff. He does a tremendous amount of charity work helping blind people, helping the planet by planting trees, as I mentioned, bringing fresh water to people in Africa who would otherwise die and have dysentery. He's doing a lot of good things. But do we have to contribute to early deaths of hundreds of millions of Americans to help a million or two here or there? At some point? The math just doesn't add up.