Is Our Food Supply Making Us Sick? - Calley Means - #849

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Calley Means. He's an entrepreneur, health and wellness advocate, and an author. Why is America struggling with all time highs of obesity and illness? Healthcare has never been more advanced, and yet levels of healthiness have never been worse. What's going on? And is there a way to make America healthy again? Expect to learn why modern health is so broken, the healthcare system's biggest issues, which health problems are unique to Americans, what is wrong with American food compared to the rest of the world, the most harmful environmental toxins to avoid, what politicians are not doing from a regulatory standpoint to help Americans, and much more. I really tried my hardest to stress test Calley's ideas today. I don't want fear-mongering and unqualified concerns around the things that people are putting in their bodies, but it seems pretty robust. The stuff that he is talking about, the bottom line is you don't need to look far to see how poor the health outcomes are for most Americans. Globally, just FYI, obesity is now the number one form of malnutrition in the world. So you have starvation at one end and you have obesity at the other. They're both forms of malnutrition and there are more obese people, nearly double, than there are starving people. So, yeah, Calley is kind of at the forefront of a lot of this stuff. So there is an awful lot to take away from today. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Calley Means.
Why is modern health so broken?

**Calley Means** (1:57)
The fundamental incentive that every single lever of healthcare makes more money when a child is sicker for longer periods of time. I mean, let's get out of conspiracy theories, let's get out of any conjecture. Just as a fundamental statement of economic fact, I want everyone to assess this for themselves and everyone to think about this. But you look at insurance companies. People don't realize this, but the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, they set a 15% medical loss ratio. So insurance companies can only make a 15% profit margin. But by law, they can raise premiums to get that 15%. So it was a big populous thing with Obamacare. It's like, why are insurance companies making such high profit? But when you put it that it's only 15% and they can raise prices to get that 15%, what does that incentivize? It incentivizes higher costs. What does that mean? It means more people getting sick. The insurance industry is directly, unimpeachably incentivized for more Americans to get sick. And what has happened since Obamacare? Premiums have doubled in the past 10 years. So healthcare costs have been the highest driver of inflation. And I talked to, on this journey, talking to many insurance executives, reach out behind closed doors. They say it's absolutely obvious. Nobody's trying to be evil at those insurance companies. But when it comes between incentivizing exercise, incentivizing healthy eating, and just kind of ignoring that and having more and more people get sick and paying out more and more costs, that's what they're incentivized to do.
Obviously, pharmaceutical companies, 95% of medical spending, 95% of pharma sales are on chronic disease treatments, okay? So it's when you get heart disease, get kidney disease, get cancer, get these conditions that are lifetime management, they're lifetime management drugs. That's a beautiful invention because chronic disease that has to be managed, not cured, is recurring revenue. So there hasn't been new antibiotic strains invented in the past 30 years because that's a pill that you take and get off. It's all about chronic disease management. So it's just fundamentally, when insurance, when a pharmaceutical company can get you on this chronic disease pharmaceutical treadmill, that's a profitable patient. And when it happens earlier and earlier and that kid gets sick, but doesn't die, just suffers, that economically is a good thing. And this is why there's this devil's bargain where fundamentally, you know, nine out of ten killers of Americans, the conditions that are torturing our lives are lifestyle related.
And you have heart disease rates exploding among kids. You have cancer rates now exploding among kids. You have...

**Chris Williamson** (4:23)
What do you mean when you say kids under 18?

**Calley Means** (4:24)
Yeah, under 18 The New York Times recently, pediatric cancer rates are at an all-time high this year in 2024 The New York Times recently did an article about this on the front page. It said cancer rates are exploding among kids. Nobody knows why. So the pharmaceutical industry isn't interested in why that's happening. And we know why it's happening. It's happening because of environmental factors, food, sedentary lifestyle. They are profiting from that. And just a good long-term patient is a healthy patient. So cancer rates have gone up among kids. Prescriptions of statins have doubled among high schoolers in just the past five years. We all know about antidepressants. They're prescribed like candy. So if you just think about it, what a pharmaceutical company wants, a healthy, thriving child that's exercising, that's eating healthy, that's in the sunlight, that's not a profitable patient. So that's the pharmaceutical interest.