Political agendas have “co-opted” science in America, according to the founder of an organization that helps consumers spend their health care dollars on proactive, preventative solutions like fitness, nutrition, and innovative health technology.
In recent years, Calley Means, founder of Truemed and co-author of “Good Energy,” says science has become intermingled with public policy, which has led to things like nutrition guidelines that are not founded in the most accurate data and research.
“It is not the job of science to make public policy, it is the job of scientists to tell the truth,” Means said during a “Restoring American Wellness” event at The Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday.
Citing a “closed-door meeting” he had with President-elect Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who Trump has tapped to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, Means said he is encouraged to see that there “is not discussion of ideology when it comes to the MAHA [Make America Healthy Again] movement.”
Kennedy is leading the MAHA movement and has been vocal about America’s growing health crisis for years.
“There is a clear mandate to get back to science,” Means said, adding that “President Trump is going to usher in a golden age of science.”
The opportunity under the Trump administration, Means said, is to “get the red tape out of the way and mandate that [National Institutes of Health] grants go to unbiased scientific research. Let’s get to the bottom of why we’re getting sick. Let’s have unbiased scientific guidelines, and then that will set a parameter to make logical public policy decisions.”
For decades, the U.S. government has released nutrition guidelines to the American people, and the food industry and consumers have largely “complied with the guidelines,” according to Nina Teicholz, an investigative science journalist who spoke alongside Means during Wednesday’s event.
“The idea that Americans don’t follow the guidelines is not supported by the data that we have,” Teicholz said, and yet, chronic health issues continue to rise.
The prevalence of chronic disease has “increased steadily” over the past 20 years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In fact, the CDC reports that “an estimated 129 million people in the U.S. have at least one major chronic disease.”
Dr. Tammy Born Huizenga, owner and operator of the Born Clinic and a board-certified family medicine physician, discussed the need for preventative medicine during the Heritage event, noting that a lot of doctors leave medical school and “only have one tool in [their] box, and that’s a prescription pad.”
Prescriptions are a tool, Huizenga said, noting that she writes prescriptions every day, but prescriptions don’t address the root causes of illness or disease.
Teicholz is also an author and the founder of the Nutrition Coalition, a nonprofit organization that says it aims to ensure that dietary guidelines the government puts out “are evidence-based, to reverse chronic diseases in America.” She points to America’s official government nutrition guidelines as one of the reasons for the countries increasing health crisis.
The official nutrition guidelines recommend switching “to low-fat or fat-free dairy milk or yogurt,” avoiding saturated fats, and keeping consumption of trans fats “as low as possible without compromising the nutritional adequacy of the diet.”
The demonization of fats can be traced back to Ancel Keys, according to Teicholz. With the rise of heart disease in the 1950s, Keys, a physiologist, concluded that the consumption of saturated fats and dietary cholesterol led to clogged arteries and ultimately to a heart attack.
The American Heart Association adopted this view in the 1960s and recommended Americans replace saturated fats with vegetable oils, Teicholz explained. In the 1980s, the government adopted Keys’ advice into its nutrition guidelines. But Keys’ findings were not “based on any rigorous science at all,” Teicholz said. “It was based on unpublished data … [and] showed association, but not causation.”
Keys’ findings and the recommendations that followed caused Americans “to do two things that have harmed our health: dramatically reduce meat and dairy,” she said, adding that meat and dairy are the “most nutrient dense foods that we have.”
With the reduction of healthy proteins and fats found in meat and dairy, Americans began eating more carbohydrates, starches, and sugars.
The body secretes insulin to process carbohydrates, starches, and sugars, but a steady diet of these foods leads to “a condition called insulin resistance,” Teicholz explained. Insulin resistance is “an inability to deal with all of those carbohydrates, the glucose coming into your body. And that is the root cause of chronic diseases,” she said.
What is needed now are “evidence based dietary guidelines,” according to Teicholz.
