Jillian Michaels at the American Health and Nutrition Roundtable: "We are in the middle of an extinction level event. The American people need help."
On Monday, September 23, at a Roundtable on American Health and Nutrition hosted by Senator Ron Johnson, Jillian Michaels made a powerful MAHA appeal.
I’ve transcribed it below, but it’s well worth a listen.
The entirety of my generation along with the two generations that followed have fallen victim to America’s unchecked obesity crisis and over 170 co-morbidities that go along with it.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve watched my friends jabbing themselves every day with fertility drugs, praying for a pregnancy. My friends getting up at the crack of dawn to get radiated where the lump was found in their breast. My friends swallowing fistfuls of pills to manage their debilitating anxiety and depression.
The decades between 1980 and now did not beget a genetic quantum leap in which our DNA inexplicably mutated to make American bodies expand and fall ill at an unprecedented pace. And while GenX, Millenials and GenZ have our problems, 75% of us are not stupid, weak or lazy, so hopefully you are wondering WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO US?
And we’re here to tell you.
In the late 70s and the early 80s, a sinister series of events converged to change food and subsequently health in America indefinitely. A plague that crept like a fog while we slept, literally and figuratively, blindly trusting that the powers that be would never betray us. I mean it seemed unthinkable to question whether a corporation would poison us for profit. I mean the widespread assumption, at least when I was a kid, was that they were acting on our behalf. That they wanted to make food more affordable and more convenient.
But it was this betrayal of trust that allowed them to insidiously infiltrate every part of our lives. Home cooked meals became fast-food “value meals”. Libraries and book stores with no food or drink policies installed cafes selling 500 calorie coffee drinks and pastries. Eggs became heart disease cholesterol bombs and Honey Nut Cheerioes got labeled “heart healthy.”
The default human condition in the 21st century is obese by design. Specific traceable forms of what’s referred to as structural violence are created by the catastrophic quartet of Big Farming, Big Food, Big Pharma and Big Insurance. They systematically corrupt every institution of trust, which has led to the global spread of obesity and disease.
Dysfunctional and destructive agricultural legislation like the Farm Bill, which favors high yield genetically engineered crops like corn and soy, leading to the proliferation of empty calories saturated with all of these toxins that we’ve been talking about today for 3 hours. It seems like we can never say enough about it. And then this glut of cheap calories provides a boon to the food industry giants. They just turn it into a bounty of ultra-processed, factory assembled foods and beverages strategically engineered to undermine your society and foster your dependence like nicotine and cocaine. So we literally cannot eat just one.
And to ensure that you don’t, added measures are taken to inundate our physical surroundings. We’re literally flooded with food and we are brainwashed by ubiquitous cues to eat. Whether it’s the Taco Bell advertisement on the side of a bus as you drive to work or the vending machine at your kid’s school, there’s no place we spend time that’s untouched. They’re omnipresent. It’s mega celebrities eating McDonalds and “lovin’ it”, sponsored dieticians paid to promote junk foods on social media using anti-diet body positivity messaging like “derail the shame” in relation to fast food consumption. Time Magazine brazenly issuing a defense of ultra processed foods on their cover with the title “What if Ultra Processed Foods Aren’t as Bad as You Think?”
And when people like us try to sound the alarm, they ensure that we are swiftly labeled as anti-science fat shamers and even racists. They launch aggressive lobbying efforts to influence you, our politicians, to shape policy, secure federal grants, tax credits, subsidy dollars which proliferates products and heavily pads their bottom line. They have created a perfect storm in which pharmaceuticals that cost hundreds if not thousands per month, like Ozempic, that are linked to stomach paralysis, pancreatitis and thyroid cancer can actually surge. This reinforces a dependence on medical interventions to manage weight in a society where systemic change in and food production and consumption is desperately needed and also very possible.
These master corporations have mastered the art of distorting the research, influencing the policy, buying the narrative, engineering the environment and manipulating consumer behavior.
So given all of this, the question becomes how did I escape?
I mean I still remember the lunches my mom would pack me when I was a little kid. I mean it was such innocence and love and she had no idea that my kindergarten lunchbox contained at least 50, now I’m thinking it’s far more, carcinogens, solvents, emulsifiers, colorings preservatives… Frankenfoods like juice boxes with no juice, processed meat held together by meat glue. I mean as a tween, I would sit on the couch after school just numbingly inhaling Cheetos and Oreos in front of the TV - there was no such thing as mealtimes – and I can stuff myself endlessly and never feel full. Buckets of KFC at night for our family dinner because it was quick, convenient, affordable… And I remember I would lay in bed comatose. It was a lifestyle equivalent to a death sentence, but we never questioned it because we were just a family that was simply attuned to the culture.
So it should come as no surprise that by that tender age of 13 I was obese, failing in school and becoming increasingly depressed and despondent. And my mom began to feel helpless. She spoke to my pediatrician and the child psychiatrist, both of whom suggested she medicate me on Prozac and Ritalin. But she was watching many of her friends kids on this exact same protocol and they weren’t improving. My mom was becoming progressively desperate to help me. And then fate intervened. She met another mom whose child had been thriving since she joined a local martial arts studio and she signed me up the next day. And my sensei was smart enough to recognize the ways in which America’s youth were being routinely poisoned. And he cared enough to create and environment where myself and the other students under his wing were educated, insulated and nourished to become our best selves.
I went on to get my black belt and become a trainer and a nutritionist myself with the intention of waking up the others and giving them the same tools that he gave me. And while I have been fortunate enough to pull many back from the edge, over the course of my 30 year career, I have lost just as many if not more than I’ve saved. I have watched them slip through my fingers. Mothers that orphaned their children. Husbands that widowed their wives. I have even watched parents forced to suffer the unthinkable loss of their adult children. There are not words to express the sadness I have felt and the fury knowing that they were literally sacrificed at the altar of unchecked corporate greed.
Most Americans are simply too financially strained, psychologically drained and physically addicted to break free without a systemic intervention. Attempting to combat the status quo and the powers that be is beyond swimming upstream. It is like trying to push a rampaging river that’s infested with piranhas. After years of trying to turn the tide, I submit that the powers that be are simply too powerful for us to take on alone. I implore the people here that shape the policy to take a stand. The buck must stop with you while the American people tend to the business or raising children and participating in the workforce to ensure that the wheels of our country go round.
They tapped you to stand watch. They tapped you to stand guard.
We must hold these bad actors accountable. And I presume the testimonials you heard today moved you. Digest them. Discuss them. And act upon them. Because if this current trend is allowed to persist, the stakes will be untenable. We are in the middle of an extinction level event. The American people need help. They need heroes. And people of Washington your constituents chose you to be their champion.
Please. Be the change. Thank you.
You can watch the full roundtable discussion here.
Meanwhile, here are some other testimonies…
Dr. Casey Means on Metabolic Dysfunction:
It’s not an overstatement to say that I learned virtually NOTHING at Stanford Medical School about the tens of thousands of scientific papers that elucidate these root causes of why American health is plummeting and how environmental factors are causing it.
Calley Means elaborates…
“If you remove advancements from infectious and acute conditions, life expectancy has not increased in the past 100 years.”
“We spend 90% to 95% of all medical spending on chronic issues, and it's done nothing.”
“The medicalization of chronic disease in the past 50 years has been an abject failure.“
Heart disease has gone up as more statins are prescribed.
Type II diabetes has gone up as more metformin is prescribed.
ADHD has gone up as more Adderall is prescribed.
Depression and suicide has gone up as more SSRIs are prescribed.
Pain has gone up as more opioids are prescribed.
Cancer has gone up as we've spent more on cancer.
Now J.P. Morgan, literally, at the conference in San Francisco recently, they put up a graph, and they showed as more Ozempic is projected to be prescribed over the next 10 years, obesity rates are going to go up as more Ozempic is prescribed.”
“Ninety percent of medical costs are from a weaponized food system. It's not that complicated.”
“Those scientists weaponized our ultra-processed food. That is the problem with ultra-processed food. You have the best scientists in the world creating this food to be palatable and to be addictive.”
“When it comes to the chronic conditions that are plaguing our lives, we should distrust almost every institution regarding nutrition or chronic disease advice.”
“It's the trillions of dollars of incentives that are in the way, and we must urgently remove corruption from the USDA, the CDC, the NIH, and our other medical institutions and get appropriate medical guidelines. We must renounce the Flexner Report and prioritize root cause interventions and systems thinking to reverse the chronic disease crisis.”
I’ll close with another quote from Dr. Casey Means:
This is a spiritual crisis. We are choosing death over life. We are choosing darkness over light for people and the planet, which are inextricably linked. We are choosing to erroneously believe that we are separate from nature and that we can continue to poison nature and then outsmart it.
Our path out will be a renewed respect for the miracle of life and a renewed respect for nature. We can restore health to Americans rapidly with smart policy and courageous leadership. We need a return to courage. We need a return to common sense and intuition. We need a return to awe for the sheer miraculousness of our lives.
We need all hands on deck.
Great, but food is only part of the destruction & poisoning of humanity.
Powerful & informative - thank you much ATR ...