Reader flora recommended this Tucker Carlson interview with the highly credentialed sister and brother Casey and Calley Means, who both were on well-paid, prestigious career tracks. They gave it up because they could no longer stand profiting from a system that makes and keeps Americans sick.
It looks as if the ground rules for the interview usefully kept Dr. Casey from promoting her book Good Energy (which while getting very good review for its overall analysis and guidance, does elicit some grumbles about her pricey bio-hackish products) and focused on the train wreck of American diets and medical practice, and the incentives that made them so. Some of the factoids are remarkable, such as 50% of American children suffer from a chronic disease, and the stunning increases in some ailments which were once rare. They also describe how the food pyramid was a vehicle for legitimating consumption more sugar and highly processed foods, including in school lunches, and how specialization in medicine prevents doctors from looking at root causes of most ailments. Calley stresses that both food and pharma industry executives are well aware of the damage their business models do, yet shrug as if nothing can be done. But the costs show up, not merely in worsening health despite world-leading expenditures, but also the high suicide rate among doctors.
At the end, they describe how many bad practices, particularly involving corruption in research, could be ended via executive order. Even though it is vanishingly unlikely that either presidential candidate would drop this hammer on such powerful industries, the executive order could also serve as a cudgel to get these industries to abandon some of their worst practices.
In a bit of synchronicity, the Financial Times gives the lead op-ed position today to to Ultra-processed and fast food is everywhere — and causing us harm. Key sections:
Picture a world where Tony the Tiger is caged, Ronald McDonald has hung up his clown shoes, and Colonel Sanders is court-martialled; where what’s euphemistically referred to as “less healthy” food is sold without spin. A world without mascots grinning over photo-shopped burgers or whispering, ‘Go on, try it’ through the TV. If we did it to the Marlboro man; we can do it to a cartoon tiger.
It took the UK 50 years from discovering the link between smoking and lung cancer to finally stubbing out cigarette advertising in 2003, and a further 13 years to end branded packaging. The proposed ban on fast-food advertising has taken a similarly tortuous route. On the table for well over a decade, boosted by one Conservative prime minister and bumped by the next, it’s now on a long menu of tasks facing Labour ministers. Under the proposed ban, less healthy products won’t be advertised on TV before the watershed (from 9pm to 5.30am) and online 24/7 from next October.
This is not enough. As with cigarettes, it’s time we had honest branding — or no branding — when it comes to fast and ultra-processed food. Obesity costs the NHS £6.5bn a year and is the biggest preventable cause of cancer after smoking. One in four adults in England is obese. More shockingly, a nationwide study this year found nearly one in four children in England’s primary schools are obese by the time they leave, making them more likely to suffer health issues throughout their lives. Our inability to regulate the brands and their colourful mascots harms the young most of all.
The last six months have seen a flood of reports about ultra-processed foods, both the threat they pose to our health and their ubiquity. Items we might not have considered particularly bad, such as pasta sauces and ready meals, are on the list.
Now to the main event:
Casey Means was a Stanford-educated surgeon. Her brother Calley was a lobbyist for pharma and the food industry. Both quit their jobs in horror when they realized how many people were being killed by the systems they participated in. This is an amazing story.
(0:54) Who Are… pic.twitter.com/1oIVLvPlAv
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) August 16, 2024