Health as a Mega Trend | Justin Mares

Justin: So what we are gonna talk about. is the US health crisis. This is like my pet topic. This is a thing that I think about all the time. It's what I've spent my entire career working on. Uh, and it's really what I consider to use a term that Patrick and Brent have talked about, uh, kind of my life's work. Um, so what does that mean today?

Today I'm the founder. Uh, I started a new company about nine months ago called TruMed. TruMed is a, basically a payment tool that makes it so that you can use tax free HSA and FSA dollars on [00:01:00] things that actually help address chronic disease. So like Pay for a gym membership, supplements, healthy food, and the like.

Uh, previous to that, I've started a couple different consumer health brands, uh, Kettle and Fire, as Brent mentioned, Perfect Keto, a non alcoholic wine brand that in the about eight and a half years since founding have done a little over half a billion dollars in sales. And so we've seen like a lot of good success and, you know, have, I've gone like very deep into the health and the, the food world.

So, I want to start this talk by introducing, uh, Chauncey Moreland. This, our friend Chauncey, he, in 1892, uh, was part of a circus troupe that traveled around the world exhibiting him as the world's fattest man. And this man, like, you know, not, not to shame him or anything like that, but, he, uh, like, in 1892, Chauncey was notable for being the size that, like, People just couldn't comprehend, didn't see anything like that.

I think today, Chauncey basically wouldn't stand out at like your standard Denny's or something. It's, [00:02:00] and again, this is not to remark on any one individual. I think that what is going on is we are being literally poisoned by our food system. And that's what I want to talk about. Looks like this is a little zoomed in, but that's okay.

So chronic disease prevalence since Uh, if you can, the x axis is basically 1940 to today. Uh, you know, rates of chronic disease have exploded. Uh, with that, healthcare costs have also exploded. Uh, we have, today, the least healthy generation of Americans that the world has literally ever seen, that has ever existed.

Uh, 50 percent of adults have pre diabetes or diabetes. 73 percent obese or overweight. 93 percent of Americans, uh, have at least one metabolic marker of dysfunction. Uh, and chronic disease is up 300%. Here's more bad stuff. So I told you this is going to be depressing. So, 25 percent of kids, kids have prediabetes.

45 percent of, again, our kids are obese or overweight. The average American will have 17. 6 [00:03:00] prescriptions, different prescriptions, over the course of their lifetime. Here's another thing that I learned recently that just kind of blew my mind. The richest men in the U. S. live on average 15 years longer than their poorer counterparts, which is almost entirely due to nutrition and chronic illness.

We're seeing sperm count and testosterone levels down north of 40 percent in the last 50 years, uh, and this is just a weird one, but it makes sense and I can talk more about this, but girls are hitting puberty one to two years sooner. than they were 40 years ago. Uh, if you look and run studies, basically, um, you know, scientists can induce by exposing, um, by exposing, like, females to certain chemicals that are in our food system or in our water and all sorts of things, uh, they can actually induce early puberty.

So we know why this is happening. It's just It's happening. These chemicals are everywhere in our system. This also, I think, is an incredible, mind blowing, and, again, sad stat. 1990, a time that I'm sure almost all of us remember, uh, you know, I was one years old, uh, so I don't, [00:04:00] but, uh, you know, there was no states with obesity rates above 20 percent.

You would read articles in the late 90s where they were like, the obesity epidemic, like, what is going on? Now, there are zero states, you know, 28 years later. that have an obesity rate below 20%. This is all on top of, like, we're not even touching on the explosion in chronic disease, cancer, ADHD, depression, uh, anxiety, all these things that I think are comorbid with, um, you know, with these different health issues.

From an economic standpoint, The U. S. Spends more money than any other country and gets worse outcomes. We also, as of this year, had the second year in a row where life expectancy is going down. So if you're an American, we've had this amazing, you know, tail wind that has lasted for over 100 years of life expectancy goes up practically every year.

That's now changing, and it's been changing for two years. Uh, the chronic disease epidemic is literally killing Americans. Uh, and not only is it killing us, we are spending more and more dollars to try and manage healthcare, [00:05:00] and it's not working. Healthcare cost is a percentage of GDP. Uh, it's up about 300 percent since 1950.

Uh, not only has care gotten expensive, not only are healthcare costs going up like this, but most of these costs are going towards treating, uh, or not even treating, managing chronic illness. Uh, this is not like Someone is, you know, gets, has some sort of metabolic or chronic issue. They go to the doctor, they get treated, and they're fine.

This is more managing the myriad number of people that are in and out of the system over and over again for diabetes or any number of these things that are costing, uh, not only the American taxpayer, but, you know, costing these people their time, their energy, their lives, their everything. All this is happening for some of you who are like, you know, is it just exercise?

Are Americans lazy? Uh, you know, do they not want to do this? All this is happening while Americans are exercising more than we ever have before. Uh, and they're smoking less. It's not smoking. And this is something I very much believe. There is a common thing, I think, when I talk about this, when I get on my little soapbox and [00:06:00] start to depress people in conversation, uh, this is a common thing that I hear is, you know, well, aren't Americans just lazy?

Don't they just not want to work out? It's, you know, it's the fault of the individual. I think that this is one of the biggest lies that's happening, uh, in the U. S. right now. I fundamentally don't think Americans want to be sick and fertile. Yeah, if you look, this is another thing. Infertility rates are going through the roof.

People are having trouble conceiving, um, that to a crazy degree. Uh, something like artificial, um, reproductive technologies, ART, the use of those is going up like 10 percent over the last couple years, per year over the last couple years. It's crazy. And all this is new. 50 years ago, this was not the case.

This is a photo from, uh, a beach in 1970. This is not a 75 percent of people were not obese or overweight, uh, from a clinical level. This is, this is a novel thing that 50 years ago just didn't happen. In fact, if we were to get chronic disease levels back to the levels that they were at in 1950, or sorry, 1970, [00:07:00] today, healthcare costs would go down by 75%, life expectancy would go up, all sorts of good things would happen.

Not to mention, like, People have more energy, you know, happier. There's a strong relationship between, um, you know, between fitness, gut health and the like, and, and mental health. Why do I care about this? I feel pretty strongly that if anything is going to end the American experiment, it is this. I, I fundamentally believe that you can't have a healthy country.

Made up of sick people. I don't think that you can have a healthy populace, one that gets along, is productive, is all this, with fundamentally sick people that are in and out of a healthcare system that is fundamentally broken. Uh, another depressing stat, uh, that I learned recently is that 23%, only 23 percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 today are physically fit enough, healthy enough to qualify for military service.

So, literally, we are, we are moving towards a point where the average American is not healthy enough [00:08:00] to defend the country, is not healthy enough to work, is not healthy to do anything that, that probably we value. So, this is my setting the table. Things are really bad. Why is this happening? I think that why this is happening is purely incentives.

We'll talk a lot about this. In my opinion, the invisible hand of our healthcare and our food systems, uh, are nudging the players in these different systems to do things that are bad for consumers, for us. You basically think about, you know, pharma has not made a lot of money off of a 50 year old who is healthy, has very, you know, few to none metabolic issues.

They make a lot of money on someone who is sick, who's getting 17 prescriptions over the course of their lifetime, who's on, uh, something like, you know, something that I'd love to chat with people about, is, uh, you may have heard of GLP 1, a class of drugs called Wegovy, these sorts of things. You know, these 15, 000 a year shots that people have to take every single week.

That is a super profitable person. And so, the invisible hand. [00:09:00] The incentives in the pharma space nudge people towards being on these medications indefinitely. Not treating things, just being on them. The food system is no better. The most profitable stuff in the food world are high margin, addictive, highly processed.

There's a reason that, you know, when you, when you think about, like, so my background, I'll just say, is I've started these different food companies, uh, Kettle and Fire is one of them that I'll just use as an example. We are using very, very minimally processed stuff. Uh, doing so is super expensive. We've literally looked at, you know, there are ingredients in our products that are, Eight times more to use a real food as opposed to like a natural flavor that you know is trying to represent or trying to like, uh, copy one of these real foods.

If you look at these publicly traded companies, um, that are the makers of m and MSS and all of these very like, highly processed, addictive food stuffs, they're incredibly profitable. Like the more [00:10:00] processing you put into this stuff, the more that you are paying very, very little for your core ingredient inputs.

The more money these, these. You know, these big food companies make, which, again, means that they churn out over and over and over again fake food products that are addictive, highly profitable, and then they take those profits and put it into what they call policy, research, all these sorts of things. Yeah, this is, uh, something that my friend David Perel actually pointed out to me who just got off stage, but, you know, I think it's crazy that the release, the modern release of the dietary guidelines really maps quite well to America's rise in obesity and overweight.

Why is that? It's proven that 95 percent of the panel that created the current USDA guidelines has ties to big food or pharma. If you look at the research budgets of the NIH, the National Institute of Health, Big Food spends 11 on nutrition research for every 1 that the NIH spends. In the last two years [00:11:00] alone, there have been 50, 000 nutrition studies.

These are not studies like, wow, I wonder what is, you know, does X ingredient work to actually drive longevity for, for humans. These are studies that are meant to confuse people, confuse policymakers, consumers, everyone, that, and not understand or not be able to think clearly about what is actually healthy and what is not.

The last thing I would say is 75 percent of SNAP, this is, food stamps and the like, uh, goes towards ultra processed foods. Coca Cola makes over a billion dollars a year in revenue from food stamp recipients spending their SNAP money on soda. Uh, for those of you who are curious, one, that's insane. Like, can we just say that that's completely insane?

But for those of you that are curious, Today, someone can spend their food stamp, uh, food stamps on soda, because consumer choice, we're told, but they're not allowed to spend it on any hot food items. You can't buy a chicken. You can't buy anything that's prepared to eat at the grocery store. It's illegal.

I want to call out this example because I think it is the a perfect [00:12:00] encapsulation of just all that is going wrong in our sort of food and healthcare system. This is the nutrient density score that, uh, for something called the Tufts Nutrition School Food Compass. I wrote about this online. 100 is the best.

Those are foods that you should eat as many of as of them as possible. They're great for you. At the bottom, Foods to be avoided at all costs. In this study, Tufts Nutrition took a team of 10, they took several million dollars from the NIH and big food sponsors, and what they came out with is that Cheerios, Lucky Charms, and 60 other name brand cereals are better for you than cheddar cheese, ground beef, or any of these whole foods that humans have been eating for literally millions of years.

This is the research that is getting put out there that is being sponsored by Big Food. And that the crazy and frustrating thing to me is that not only is this clearly wrong, it's so obviously wrong, it is insane, but this is then used as [00:13:00] justification to policy makers and people that are doing, that are making decisions about what goes in school lunches.

Oh, did you see a recent study? Cheerios, better than ground beef. We better do meatless Mondays and like roll out the Cheerios to everyone. Sorry, I get fired up about this stuff. So, so this is another incredibly depressing fact is if you, if you look, uh, today, a risk factor for childhood obesity is eating school lunch.

So what that means is if you have to eat school lunches because your family can't afford it, whatever it is, You are now more likely to It is like a true risk factor, and childhood obesity is one of the most costly things from a U. S. healthcare system standpoint. It's bad for childhood development.

There's a bunch of other issues with it. We also have 50 percent of cafeterias serving fast food, 80 percent of contracts with soda companies, and pizza as a vegetable. This is literally true. Pizza is a vegetable because two tablespoons of tomato paste suffice as a veggie. And I know what many of you are [00:14:00] thinking, isn't tomato a fruit?

The answer is yes, it is a fruit! But, how does a fruit become a vegetable? Lobbying. So, this is what's going on. I want to share another quick case study. So, Coca Cola, some years ago, in 2010 to 2015, they spent 120 million dollars. Creating something they call the Global Energy Balance Network. What is the G E B N, the Global Energy Balance Network?

This network basically spent all this money funding research pointing to, oh, it's not actually, you're, you know, gaining weight or anything like this. Has nothing to do with sugar consumption. Nothing with diet. It's all your energy balance. Are you moving? Are you working out enough? All this kind of stuff.

And what they found is, Doing a, doing a review of these studies, 93 percent of studies that, uh, Coca Cola sponsored during this period of time that looked into is there any harm associated with soda consumption found no, no harm. In some cases, maybe even it's good for you. 88 [00:15:00] percent of studies that, during that time, done on soda consumption found, of course, this stuff is bad for you.

What we obviously all know. So Big Food is doing much more than pushing policy towards addictive, ultra processed foods. We're also paying them to do so. They've gotten over 204 billion the last 25 years, most of that going towards corn, soy, and wheat subsidies. Basically, the reason that Coca Cola in the U.

S. has high fructose corn syrup rather than sugar. Uh, you might be asking, why is that? It's because we subsidize corn, which makes it super cheap, so that when you process it, it's actually much cheaper to use high fructose corn syrup rather than real sugar, because it's effectively not free, but close to it for many of these large companies.

We then do this with, same with like, this is why you see wheat and everything, this is why gluten allergies are exploding, this is why soybean oil makes up an average of 20 percent of an American's daily calorie consumption. It's because these things are cheap, and then they're in everything. And [00:16:00] as we incentivize Americans to get sick, we subsidize these crops, corn, soy, wheat, for everything.

These products end up in everything, people get sick, and then we pay record healthcare costs. Once they do so I think this is the most crazy thing that is happening in the us. We basically, again, subsidize this stuff. Things are cheap, they make their way into everything. People get sick, and our healthcare costs are the highest in the world as more of the money goes to big food subsidies, spending and the like.

They're pouring more and more of these dollars into nutrition studies and the like to pretend that this thing is complicated. I don't think that this is complicated. A lie that you're going to see over the next several years, as these GLP the like are ruled out, is that obesity is genetic. It's a brain disease.

Uh, Novo Nortz, the maker of uh, Ozempic, has already spent about 27 million dollars, um, bribing, you know, whatever, I don't know what you want to call it. Uh, obesity researchers, doctors, to say that obesity is genetic. It's a brain disease. [00:17:00] It's nothing that could possibly be done about it. Why are they doing this?

Because as soon as it is determined to be a genetic disease, a disease that, you know, you're born with your genes, it's not your fault, uh, which again, I don't think that this is the fault. I think we're in a very messed up system right now. Um, but as soon as it's labeled as it's not your fault, what happens is the U.

S. government covers that. We are, we're looking at potentially, there's currently a bill in Congress with 171 congressmen behind it that is saying that we as a U. S. taxpayer should cover, uh, the use of Ozempic. in anyone who is struggling with weight, obesity, and the like. Uh, they're saying that we should cover this, and they're, they're recommending it.

The American Pediatric Association is recommending Ozempic weekly shots for the rest of your lives to children as young as 12. While at the same time, and I'm not, please someone fact check me, I wish this all was not true. But at the same time as the APA is recommending this, [00:18:00] the APA also has refused to say that we should remove Coke and soda from school lunches, we should take Lunchables out of the cafeteria, which are now being covered by the government.

Um, they have refused to stand up on any issues. But this one. So, that is the depressing part. So, I've gotten into this issue from starting Kettle on Fire. I started that eight and a half years ago, uh, with my brother. That's my brother. Um, we, we basically, like, started this business just thinking it was a good business opportunity.

I didn't, didn't know that much about food. I was very into, like, health for myself, but wasn't, hadn't gone as deep. And as I've gone deeper and deeper, I've become more and more convinced how messed up the system is. The system is incentivized, as I was saying, to make people sick. And a profit when they do so.

This is also a common misconception. Don't insurers not want people to be sick. After the introduction of Obamacare, the American, sorry, the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare basically said insurers are making too much money. So what are we going to do? We're going to cap the amount of profit [00:19:00] margin they can get.

So what that meant is that, yes, insurers have a cap on how much money they can make, but the absolute dollars that get spent on healthcare have gone tremendously up. So at the same time as their profit margins are capped, they're making way more money. That's why, I think, insurers are actually also not incentivized to fix anything in this incredibly messed up system.

So what do we do about it? So, diet and exercise are kind of old. Everyone's heard that. I'm going to talk about five things that I would do in today's very messed up food environment. Number one, minimize or cut out the big three, corn, soy, wheat. Not only are these the most sprayed, they're the most subsidized crops, they're also the most sprayed, tons of pesticide load, glyphosate, atrazine, and the like, but the average American, as I was saying, gets about 20 percent of their daily calories through vegetable oils of some sort.

So, if I had to bet, I know, I assume many of you are aware of trans fats and know kind of what this is, I think that seed oils are the trans fats of our current generation. [00:20:00] I think that the research is very obvious now and the market and, you know, culture and society will quickly follow to understand that these things that we have basically hugely put into our diet at rates that we have never experienced before in human history are driving a Massive amount of the chronic disease crisis that we're seeing.

Seed oils, so canola, soybean, sunflower, corn, have been linked to all of these diseases that I'm showing. They're in everything. They're in oatly. They're in like pretty much anything that is processed and packaged. And we're consuming them in amounts that we have never before seen in history. People say, oh, like, you know, corn oil, soybean oil, isn't that natural?

To get five tablespoons of corn oil, You know, this is not a big serving. Requires 98 years of corn. Corn is not an oily substance. So it requires an incredible amount of processing, harsh chemical extraction and the like to get these tiny amounts of oil out of 98 years of corn enough to make 5 tablespoons.

Now, why are we going through all the effort to do this again? Subsidies. So, [00:21:00] there we go back to that old thing. The second thing I would do, move. You know, exercise. Brent said it. I do it. Exercise is a tremendous thing. Uh, even better if you can just get in some regular movement, walking and the like, throughout the day.

Uh, third, this is my best tip for optimal health. Butthole sunning. Just kidding. Uh, sun exposure. 

Dav: There's, 

Justin: um, I, I think that we are in the very cusp starting to understand the importance that light exposure and your light diet has on your health and wellness. There's one researcher, Dr. Jack Kruse, who has talked about how Uh, if you look at different studies, effectively, you can feed a rat, a human, whoever, uh, the same diet, the same calorie, but do it at different times in the day, and those animals will put on weight differently.

They'll respond to it differently. Doctor, this guy, Jack Kruse, who's crazy, if you look him up, but he has some interesting ideas, [00:22:00] uh, has pointed out that no nutrition study ever has controlled for light exposure. So, not only do I think most nutrition studies are bunk, but they're also, in my opinion, probably missing a very important variable around sun exposure.

The next thing I would do, sleep well, that's boring, but basically, I think that if you get outside in the morning, uh, set your circadian rhythm, get some light in the middle of the day, Get in maybe a workout or something like that. Almost all of your sleep problems will pretty much go away. And then this last one.

I'm almost done. This last one I really want to talk about. Reduce your toxin burden. What do I mean by that? 92 percent of Americans have phthalates, which are linked to a decrease in testosterone, uh, in their bloodstream. 97 percent of Americans have PFOS, polyfluoroalkyl substances, uh, in their blood.

These PFOS are in 93 percent of water sources, uh, and these things are proven to have massive impacts on your hormones, on, um, you know, on how your body, like, puts on weight, all these different things. Uh, they've been linked to cancer [00:23:00] and fertility neurological conditions. Uh, I'm about to show you something really sad.

In the next slide, uh, but I'll do it right now. Actually, this is a study that they did in Mexico where they basically took 55 year old, uh, girls. Some of them were raised in the foothills and others in the valley. The ones in the foothills were above the source of water that had atrazine and other pesticide exposure.

The others in the valley were basically drinking regularly from water that came where it had a bunch of pesticide runoff. Their instructions were, draw what you think a human looks like. This is the same instruction given to two different sets of people, some groups in the valley, some in the foothills.

And this is basically, as you can see, just completely shattering the brains of these 54 and 53 month year old, you know, females. I think that the things that these toxins are doing to us are crazy. Uh, glyphosate is probably a, is a really good example. I think that this [00:24:00] is going to be a thing that many more people are going to be talking about in the coming years.

Uh, glyphosate is banned in the EU and 28 other countries. Uh, the U S allowable limit in tap water is 7, 000 times higher. than what it's allowed to be in the EU, in tap water. This glyphosate is found in the urine and blood of 93 percent of Americans. And a recent study found that 100 percent of cereals in the grocery store had glyphosate levels that would be illegal in any of these countries where glyphosate was banned.

Glyphosate, uh, and the company behind it, Bayer Monsanto, uh, they recently had the largest non, non tobacco settlement in consumer history. They just did a 13 billion settlement around glyphosate and it's, you know, because it caused cancer. We talked about that. This is funny. I don't know if you all know Alex Jones.

He's very famous for his take that they're turning the frogs gay. I don't know how many of you are Alex Jones fans. Uh, funny enough, I think this is the most accurate thing Alex Jones has maybe ever said. [00:25:00] There are, there are definitive definitive studies that we have run where we know the exact amount of atrazine, a very commonly sprayed pesticide, to put into the water to turn frogs into hermaphrodites, homosexuals, whatever.

Alex Jones was right, which is something I never thought I would say. Um, we also found, there's also studies that show polyester is, and you know, which is the common fabric that's used in almost all boxers. shirts, workout clothes, things like this, uh, are associated with lower sperm count. Wearing boxers on a, that had polyester in them had about 30 to 35 percent lower sperm, uh, you know, sperm motility and sperm count, uh, that reversed basically once people went away from wearing polyester underwear.

So what are my recommendations when it comes to toxin exposure? Get reverse osmosis water filtration and avoid common toxin sources, polyester, uh, pans, things that have like a lot of plastic and sort of leach. Um, so these are the five things that I think I would, I think are very [00:26:00] important. Cut out the big three, move, get sun exposure, sleep well, reduce your toxin burden.

Uh, thank you for letting me talk through this. You can find me on Twitter at JW Mayers. I have a monthly newsletter I write, Justin Mayers.

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