.svg){kind=icon}
.svg){kind=icon}
.svg){kind=icon}
.svg){kind=icon}
.svg){kind=icon}
“All humans who have existed have spent their life looking for the meat and fat of the biggest ruminant near them and the hardest money they can use to save. Bitcoin carnivory is just the basic human condition in today’s technological reality. It is fiat that is moving people away from eating meat and feeding them industrial waste instead. That’s what needs explanation, not the fact that humans are being human and looking for meat and hard money.”
Matthew Lysiak is a nationally recognized journalist and author of Newtown: An American Tragedy (Gallery/Simon & Schuster, December 2013), and Drudge Revolution (Ben Bella, July 28, 2020), along with hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles. Lysiak is played by actor Jim Sturgess in Home Before Dark, which was renewed for a second season by Apple Streaming Plus.
As an investigative journalist for the New York Daily News, Mr. Lysiak has reported on hundreds of national stories and has appeared as a contributor on The Today Show, MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, and countless other national and local media outlets to discuss his work
Mr. Lysiak is also coauthor of the bestselling series Hilde Cracks the Case (Scholastic 2017) and of the young adult memoir of teen scientist Jack Andraka, Breakthrough: How One Teen Innovator Is Changing the World(Harper Collins March 2015), voted Best STEM Book of 2017 by the National Science Teachers Association
His work has also appeared in the New York Times, Newsweek, The New York Sun, AM New York, and The Guardian
Mr. Lysiak lives in Patagonia, Arizona, with his wife, Bridget, and his four daughters, Isabel (nineteen), Hilde (sixteen), Georgia (eleven), and Juliet (nine).
In 2007, as a graduate student at Columbia University, I came across the work of the Austrian school economists, and it changed my life. Understanding that money did not have to be a creature of the state, and that it can and has been provided by the market is a very strong pill to swallow, because it changes your perspective on everything related to money, which is practically everything. Over the subsequent years, I began to realize how much of modern economics is propaganda to justify inflation, and how much of modern society is shaped by fiat, in the sense of government directives, and in the sense of governments’ financing by money conjured out of thin air.
I had always wanted to write about many of these ideas, but I could never find anyone who seemed interested in them outside of the very small circle of Austrian economists who were quite familiar with them. But after discovering bitcoin and beginning to understand it, I found a growing community of people who had begun to see that the world around us is shaped by fiat. Bitcoin, as a form of money free from state control, was the living refutation of the state’s lies around money, and it could only drive you to ask questions about the rationale, and consequences, of the state’s control of money.
As these ideas began to increasingly consume my focus, I decided in 2017 to write my first book, The Bitcoin Standard, which explained the economics of bitcoin, its likely implications, and what its refutation of fiat’s rationale told us about the world fiat had wrought. One of the first topics I wanted to discuss was the impact of fiat money on food, but as I began to write about it, it became clear to me that this was too broad of a topic for inclusion in a book on bitcoin. I did discuss the impact of fiat money on time preference, government financing, wars, individual freedom, the family, and art, but adding a chapter on food was, if you’ll excuse the pun, more than I could chew.
After the success of The Bitcoin Standard, I left my job as a university professor and decided to write a sequel, The Fiat Standard, published in 2021, where I would focus on the fiat monetary system, its workings, and its economic impacts. One of the chapters of that book was entitled Fiat Food, and the next chapter, Fiat Science, also examined nutrition science and its degradation. While I believe these chapters have stood the test of time so far, and done a good job explaining my basic thesis on how fiat money has destroyed humanity’s diet and damaged our health, I realized while researching them that they barely scratched the surface of the deeply depraved criminality at play. In terms of the lives cut short, it would be no exaggeration to say that20th century nutrition science and government food policies are the biggest crime in history, putting genocides and man-made famines to shame. More than an economic analysis, this topic needed a thorough forensic investigation to reveal the details of the barely believable sequence of events, spanning over a century, which led to the complete overhaul of the modern diet and the current obesity, diabetes, and autoimmune disease epidemic ravaging our species.
Many readers of The Fiat Standard told me how unexpectedly impactful that chapter was on their diet and health. They read the book to learn about economics, but discovered that everything they were taught about nutrition was wrong, and armed with that awareness, they were able to improve their diet and health enormously, as they were no longer spinning their wheels impotently trying to improve their health using the fiat science paradigm peddled by their university and TV. There was surely a case for a book focused purely on this topic, to target people interested in focusing on the issues of health and diet and not necessarily interested in delving into the fiat monetary system and its tentacles reaching into most of our life.
The topic required more investigation, readers were asking for something focused on this topic, and I wanted to write more on the topic, but I was deeply engrossed in my third book, Principles of Economics, a textbook which I had started writing before The Fiat Standard, and whose research and writing took me more time and effort than The Bitcoin Standard and The Fiat Standard combined. Then, in the summer of 2022, in my third year of writing Principles of Economics, I received a cold approach email from Matthew Lysiak, who introduced himself as a journalist looking to write about the topics of fiat money, fiat food, bitcoin, and meat. This was the book I wanted to write, but here I had an investigative journalist who had written extensively about crimes, making him far more equipped to study the crime of the century than an economist. He could dig into primary documents and sleuth his way around the historical record to uncover the motives and circumstances of this crime, and how it developed. Fiat Food is the book I would have wanted to write myself, but more thoroughly researched as only a whodunnit crime writer could. Yet I felt it was missing two chapters I would have liked to add to this if it were my book: one detailing my own personal experience in discovering fiat foods, and another on the approach I have taken to defeat these foods and banish them from my life and digestive system, after 15 years on an increasingly low carbohydrate and low processed food diet, culminating with 8 years as a carnivore. I asked Matthew if he would let me add those two chapters to his work, and he graciously agreed.
I am honored Matthew chose to publish Fiat Food with my new publishing house, The Saif House, making it the third book I publish, and the first one by an author other than me. I enjoyed reading this work immensely, and recommend it highly to my readers. Enjoy, and bon appétit!
Two years ago, I first began to read The Fiat Standard, by Saifedean Ammous. I had previously read his first book, The Bitcoin Standard, and was greatly impressed by the intelligence and fearlessness conveyed by the author.
I had a similar reaction to The Fiat Standard, a brief history and analysis of the United States dollar, how it functions, and its pervasive effect on nearly all facets of American life. However, it would be after reading the eighth chapter of the book, titled “Fiat Food ‘’when doubts first emerged concerning the writer’s credibility.
On the surface the conclusions being drawn in the chapter by Ammous read as if pulled from the plot of a dystopian science fiction novel: The American diet has been hijacked through a combination of flawed nutrition science, anti-meat religious groups, corporate influence, and a government eager to co-opt all three for the benefit of masking the true cost of an inflation it had created as a consequence of severing ties with the gold standard.
The premise was outlandish. A bizarre conspiracy theory. However, if true, Ammous’s thesis would be rightly considered one of the most consequential crimes of our lifetime, resulting in the premature death of billions of people over the past century.
As an investigative crime reporter by trade who has investigated many of the nation’s biggest cases of crime and corruption over the past two decades, I dug deeper. First, I fact-checked the chapter. In a short time, it became clear the author had done his homework. Everything checked out.
The more I researched, the more I became convinced that Ammous had touched on one of the largest, most costly and, in terms of human life, most consequential conspiracies of the past century.
However, Ammous had only scratched the surface.
This book is written from the perspective of an investigative crime reporter with the purpose of presenting evidence to the reader on the corruption of the American food supply, the devaluation of the United States dollar, and how the two are intrinsically linked. What follows in the pages ahead is an examination of one of the most compelling “who-done-its” in American history.
This book is in no way to be regarded as a complete history of economics or as a health treatise on the benefits of meat. Rather, it is an attempt at uncovering a plot by the largest institutions of American power and the outsized ramifications this convergence has had on modern civilization.
Fiat Foods is divided into three sections. In the first section, The Poison Seeds, we highlight four of the most pivotal characters responsible for hijacking the health of our food and money, along with the religious, industrial, political, and economic conditions that enabled this corruption to gain a firm foothold in American life.
In section two, Fiat Death Spiral, we examine the motive, diving into why the government must maintain the perception that food prices are affordable, the different methods employed to accomplish that feat, and how, as a result of mutual interests, authorities have colluded with environmental religious anti-meat groups, as well as leaders of industry. This section also discusses the corrosive effects the alliance between government, religion, and corporate interests has had on the health, wealth, and autonomy of the American people.
In the third section, How Bitcoin Fixes This, we discuss and analyze how through the implementation of a decentralized electronic hard currency, Bitcoin, the fiat system responsible for poisoning our money and food, would be rendered obsolete. This opens up a pathway to a future where humanity can begin to reclaim their health, wealth, and liberty.
This book is not intended as a textbook in which chronological order is strictly followed but as a crime story where the reader is taken on a journey through time to pull the curtain back on one of America’s most consequential, yet largely unspoken, scandals. As a result, several of these sections may appear to overlap, most notably between science, industry, activist groups, and government. This is not by accident but a result of the incestuous nature of all four, which will be spelled out in the pages to follow. Please note that I am not a doctor or nutritionist, so nothing here should be considered medical advice.
Of the 117 Freedom of Information Act requests relating to historical documents requested for this project, none have been fulfilled at the time of this writing. Fortunately, the substantial amount of already public information proved to be more than adequate for the purposes of this book.
This work has benefited from the foundation already set down by countless others who pushed limits and risked careers to acquire much of the data used in the compilation of the argument to be presented.
For a more in-depth understanding of economics and Bitcoin, read The Bitcoin Standard, The Fiat Standard, and Principles of Economics, all written by Saifedean Ammous. For a more thorough understanding of how the health field has been corrupted, read The Big Fat Surprise, by Nina Teicholz, and Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes. For a more thorough understanding of the political and economic conditions of the period, read Three Days at Camp David, by Jeffrey E. Garten and The Price of Peace, by Zachary D. Carter. These seven books, along with many others, have been instrumental in the completion of this book.
President Richard Nixon took his seat behind the Resolute desk of the Oval Office on Sunday, August 15, 1971, at 8:55 p.m. Eastern Standard Time and gazed down at the seventeen triple-spaced pages in his hand. To his right, an American flag. To his left, a presidential flag.
Only a small group of the President’s staff had been informed of the speech when two days earlier, on Friday the 13th, 1971, unbeknownst to the press, choppers whisked away the administration’s economic crew to a secret location, Camp David. Nixon knew his presidency teetered on the verge of political collapse. Earlier that month, the unemployment numbers had come out and they looked grim, having gone from 4 percent to 6 percent. Worse(politically), the rate of inflation had risen to 5.84 percent.
It was a bewildering obstacle for a president who had accepted the mainstream Keynesian economic premise that high inflation and unemployment could never coexist. Yet the laws of economics as he knew them had been seemingly turned on their heads, forcing the first-term President to confront an ugly ultimatum in having to decide which of the two options before him would be more economically palatable for the nation.
Nixon believed it to be a moment that called for bold action. He had thought his narrow loss in the 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy was due to a badly timed recession1 and had vowed to himself and staffers that history would not repeat itself. This time, the President would do anything and everything to ensure the economy would not become a political liability heading into the November 1972 reelection bid.
In discussing solutions to the economic turbulence with his staff, Nixon expressed his view that the country could tolerate a degree of inflation, as long as it was slow and incremental. However, the citizenry would not stomach another bad employment report, telling advisors ahead of the secret Camp David meeting that he was “not about to be a hero” on inflation at the expense of the job market.
Nixon believed the path to lowering the rate of unemployment would mean confronting another, perhaps more formidable, hurdle. If he was going to get Americans back to work, Nixon was going to have to flood the country with more dollars. However, the actual implementation of such a task would prove problematic. At the time every $35 could be redeemed for one ounce of gold, and the United States Treasury didn’t have the reserves of gold needed to increase the dollar supply to the degree the administration believed would achieve the desired outcome.
The United States Treasury was already underwater. By the summer of 1971, America had just $10.2 billion in gold—and owed more than $40 billion in terms of the circulating dollars. The United States did not have enough gold bullion to back the dollars it had already put into circulation, much less to expand that amount.
Still, Nixon was determined not to give up. Ahead of the Camp David meeting, the President and his team contrived an ambitious plan that would shock his advisors, the nation, and the entire world: He would unchain the dollar from the constraints of gold.
No one could know for sure how the American people or leaders of foreign nations would react. The President was about to embark on an epic political gamble for the ages.
The decision was made. All that was left to do was inform the nation.
All four networks would be carrying the speech live. The National Broadcasting Company, the American Broadcasting Company, and the Educational Broadcasting Corporation would interrupt their regular scheduled programming while the Columbia Broadcasting Company made the decision to start the Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour at 8:00 p.m. instead of 8:30 p.m. so that the hour program could run in its entirety before the address. Nixon had been worried about the speech interrupting NBC’s popular Bonanza, but the urgency of the moment would win the day.
At 9:00 p.m., the camera zoomed in on the President’s face. He gazed into the camera, cleared his throat, and straightened his seventeen triple-spaced pages of notes. What happened next would be among the most pivotal decisions in history, setting off a chain reaction of unintended consequences that would spread through the rest of civilization like a cancer, corrupting nearly every part of human existence and nowhere as consequential than the economic and physical health of the people.
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government, which is the true ruling power of our country . . . .We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of . . . In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct, or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons . . . who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”
The Medical Industrial Complex refers to a network of interactions between pharmaceutical corporations, health-care personnel, insurance companies, and medical conglomerates that determines the strategy, objectives, resource distribution, and development of individual health care in America. As with the Seventh-day Adventists, environmental anti-meat activist groups and the Agro-Industrial Complex, the Medical Industrial Complex works in tandem with the others through a pursuit of mutual interests and benefits. An example of the synergistic relationship was on full display when stepping back and taking a broad look at a series of events that occurred during the first quarter of 2023.
First, in January 2023, the industry-funded Tufts University Food Compass (as discussed in the previous chapter) was released to the public. The Compass, which had been funded by industry leaders General Mills, Kellogg, along with Impossible Burger investor Bill Gates, garnered widespread media attention in its promotion of Reese’s Puffs and Fruit Loops as healthy alternatives to natural foods like meat, eggs, and cheese. During that same month, a broadcast of the television news show 60 Minutes aired, headlined by a thirteen-minute story on a new obesity drug that had recently hit the market, Wegovy. Novo Nordisk, the manufacturer of Wegovy, had announced that it “had halted Wegovy promotions in March 2022 on the heels of supply issues, but in November announced that it planned a ‘broad commercial re-launch’ in the new year. The segment in 60 Minutes, reported on by renowned correspondent Lesley Stahl, aligned perfectly with this relaunch.
Stahl began the episode summarizing the obesity epidemic before announcing to the audience, “Now there is a medication that leads to dramatic weight loss.” Next would appear Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, who was described as an obesity specialist. Stanford began by correcting a common diet misperception. Obesity, she explained, was in fact not attributable to the dramatic shift in the American diet over the past fifty years that saw a switch to processed sugar, grains and toxic “vegetable oils,” but rather, to a genetic “brain disease.”
To back up her claim, Stanford implored the audience to take a look at their own family. “The No. 1 cause of obesity is genetics,” she claimed. “That means, if you were born to parents that have obesity, you have a 50 percent to 85 percent likelihood of having the disease yourself, even with optimal diet, exercise, sleep management, and stress management.”
“Willpower?” asked Stahl.
Stanford smiled. “Throw that out the window!”
“It’s a brain disease . . . and the brain tells us how much to eat and how much to store,” she added.
Next, Dr. Caroline Apovian, a weight-management specialist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston appeared on-screen, whom Stahl described as being “relieved that at last she has a highly effective medication to offer her patients that’s safe according to the FDA.” Stahl then added that the drug “brings about an impressive average loss of 15 percent to 22 percent of a person’s weight, and it helps keep it of.”
The 60 Minutes spot continued, with the drug being described as a “fabulous, robust medication that is very effective and safe” and that “Hollywood celebrities” and “people in Hollywood” take Wegovy “to fatten their tummies.”
More than halfway through the segment, Stahl dropped a not-so-minor detail. “Doctors Apovian and Stanford have been advising companies developing drugs for obesity, including the Danish company Novo Nordisk, an advertiser on this broadcast.” However, nowhere during the segment was it disclosed by Stahl or anyone else that Stanford had been paid $27,040.49 from the drug manufacturer from 2017 through 2021, or that the segment’s other “expert,” Dr. Caroline Apovian, also worked as a Novo Nordisk consultant, receiving $73,244.03 from the company from 2015 through 2021.
For the Medical Industrial Complex, the stakes couldn’t be higher: the Holy Grail of pharmaceutical solutions to obesity was finally within reach. With four in ten American adults estimated to be obese, creating a potential 40 percent market share, and with a drug that would need to be taken by patients for the remainder of their lives, the market for anti-obesity medications would be all but certain to topple statins as the most profitable drug in human history. However, there remained a potential hurdle: cost. The out-of-pocket price to consumers for the drug exceeded on average $890 a month. For the vast majority of obese Americans, the drugs were simply not affordable.
As is often the custom in journalism, the 60 Minutes segment saved its reveal for the end, with Stahl delivering one last emotional gut punch to the viewing audience.
“The vast majority of people with obesity simply can’t afford Wegovy, and most insurance companies refuse to cover it, partly because, as AHIP—the health insurance trade association—explained in a statement, these drugs ‘have not yet been proven to work well for long-term weight management and can have complications and adverse impacts on patients.’”
The news show immediately pushed back on the notion of side effectst through assurances by Novo Nordisk funded spokeswoman Caroline Apovian that any potential complications would be minor. “Most of the side effects—nausea, vomiting—go away with time,” said Apovian, before pivoting back to the substantive issue at the heart of the segment. Her patients can’t get the medication “because insurance won’t cover it.”
A complaint fled on January 19, 2023 by the Physicians Committee, a nonproft public health advocacy organization, claimed that the segment was essentially an advertisement for the pharmaceutical company sponsoring the show, placing it in violation of Food and Drug Regulations stating that advertising for drugs “shall include information relating to the major side effects and contraindications of the advertised drugs in the audio or audio and visual parts of the presentation.”
The complaint read:
“Although it was included during a regularly scheduled episode of CBS’s popular series 60 Minutes, the Wegovy promotion meets the definition of an advertisement. The host acknowledged Novo Nordisk as ‘an advertiser on this broadcast.’ Both physicians who spoke were Novo Nordisk consultants collectively paid $100,284.52 by the company in recent years. No medical experts who were not paid by Novo Nordisk appeared, nor did the promotion discuss alternative products or approaches to address obesity.
Describing Wegovy as ‘highly effective,’ ‘safe,’ ‘impressive,’ ‘fabulous,’ ‘robust,’ and other variations on these themes, the promotion followed the same story lines Novo Nordisk uses in its other commercial advertisements, suggesting that individuals with obesity have already had full access to competent dietary guidance and that diet is largely irrelevant in obesity, ignoring alternative approaches and products, and minimizing discussion of risks and adverse reactions. The promotion repeatedly touted Wegovy’s purported benefits and displayed its packaging. As such, the promotion constitutes a television advertisement (TV ad) under FDA regulations.”
The initial rollout completed as planned, next the Medical Industrial Complex would go into overdrive to get its message out through a sophisticated two-pronged marketing campaign to:
A) Convince the public that obesity couldn’t be fixed through individual lifestyle changes and was instead due to a lack of pharmaceutical products, the groundwork of which had already been established by Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford in the 60 Minutes segment.
B) The pharmaceutical product would be covered by insurance policies, which would both increase demand in making the drug appear free of cost, while in actuality redistributing the financial burden from the obese to the other 60 percent of nonobese Americans.
Garnering support from the American news media wasn’t difficult. The pharmaceutical industry accounted for 75 percent of all television spending, with every mainstream news organization sharing at least one board member with at least one pharmaceutical company. The media machine began clicking on all cylinders, churning out positive coverage on behalf of their industry funders. By February 2023, “#ozempic” tag had over 600 million views on TikTok. A headline in USA Today read, “Obesity Was Long Considered a Personal Failing. Science Shows Us that Is Not the Case.”
“Anti-obesity Drug Demand Is Expected to Skyrocket, but Will Insurance Cover the Cost?” The subheading to the March 2023 headline read, “New weight loss drugs can cost more than $1,000 a month, but most health plans don’t cover them.”
A People Magazine profile headlined, “Washington Man Says Insurance Coverage Is the ‘Only Challenging Ting’ About Taking Wegovy for Weight Loss” told the heroic story of Bill Carlson, thirty-nine, who despite providing his height and weight, was initially denied coverage by his insurance company because he did not provide his body mass index, which was calculated using the two. The article quotes Carlson as saying, “I’m like, ‘I told you, I weigh 225lbs. and I’m five-foot-eight. You know my BMI is high.’”
Fortunately, Carlson’s persistence led to a happy ending after working with his doctor to reapply for the medication. “And then they accepted it,” Carlson said. “It took about two months or so before I was able to get it all worked out.”
Next, in April 2023, Tufts University researcher Dariush Mozaffarian, four months after releasing the industry-funded Tufts Food Compass, released another shocking “scientific” study, this one revealing that meat, and not sugar, has been the actual driver of diabetes all along. On April 17, 2023, CNN trumpeted the study.
“. . . red meat driving global rise in type 2 diabetes, study says.” In a statement, Mozaffarian announced, “These new findings reveal critical areas for national and global focus to improve nutrition and reduce devastating burdens of diabetes.”
To improve nutrition and fight diabetes, Mozaffarian prescribed a diet of more carbohydrates, albeit healthier versions, stating “critical areas for national and global focus” needed to reduce diabetes would be to increase carbohydrate intake through the steering the diet from processed grains to whole grain.”
Neither the study, nor the journalists who covered it, could explain the magic involved in how diabetes, a disease driven by glucose (sugar), could be attributed to the consumption of meat, a food absent of sugar. The study was funded in part by Pepsico, Nestle, and Dannon. Further, Mozaffarian had served on advisory boards for the US and Canadian governments, American Heart Association, the United Nations, and the World Health Organization.
Meanwhile, Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, fresh of her appearance on 60Minutes, was awarded a chair on the federal government’s 2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans Advisory Committee.
She will now have a role in establishing the dietary goals for the rest of the country, including the menus for children attending public schools.
Additionally, Novo Nordisk and the pharmaceutical industries that compose the nations single, largest, lobbying group have directed the focus of its gargantuan influence machine in a push to pass federal legislation that would force taxpayers to cover the costs for anti-obesity drugs as a part of the Medicare and Medicaid benefit. If passed, it would provide a major cash windfall for the companies. In total, the pharmaceutical industry significantly outspends all others on lobbying congress.
During the 2022 election cycle, Novo Nordisk’s political action committee made the maximal financial payments allowed by law to the election campaigns of nine political candidates, eight of whom cosponsored proposed legislation that would shift the costly burden of anti-obesity drugs to the public.
While prescribing an adult a product that necessitates its purchase for the remainder of their life is highly profitable, it is even more so when that prescription is written for a child. Next, in January 2023, the largest professional association of pediatricians in the United States issued new guidance for treating childhood obesity, emphasizing a need for early and intensive medical intervention.
In making the first change to the guidelines in fifteen years, the new policy advised pediatricians to recommend weight-loss drugs to children. In total, four drugs were approved for obesity treatment in adolescents starting at age twelve: Orlistat, Saxenda, Qsymia, and Wegovy. And Phentermine was for teens sixteen and older.
Dr. Sandra Hassink, who coauthored the new guidelines, touted the policy shift as long overdue, telling NBC News, “We now have evidence that obesity therapy is effective. There is treatment, and now is the time to recognize that obesity is a chronic disease and should be addressed as we address other chronic diseases.”
The guidelines were issued by the American Association of Pediatrics(AAP), a group whose own records reveal funding by the same pharmaceutical companies whose products it now advises doctors to prescribe. Listed on the AAP website as “partners’’ are Novo Nordisk Inc, GlaxoSmithKline, Supernus Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Procter & Gamble, and Merck.
Meanwhile, Hassink serves as the Medical Director for the AAP’s Healthy Childhood Weight Institute, whose funding comes from Nestlé, the producers of Koko Krunch, Cini Minis, Cookie Crisp, Nestle Milk Chocolate, Smarties, Dreyer’s Ice Cream, Drumsticks, and Toll House refrigerated cookie dough. Additional funds for Hassink’s research were contributed by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which was set up by the drugmaker Johnson & Johnson, the manufacturer of the diabetes treatment drug Invokana, which is also popular for of-label use in weight loss.
The events unfolding in the first quarter of 2023 had all the appearances of a well-coordinated campaign between four powerful entities: the nutritional science establishment, industry, media, and the Medical Industrial Complex. The potentiality of all happening together in the span of a few months being random or mere coincidence strains the boundaries of common sense. A more likely scenario emerges when seen through the lens of who benefits.
First came Mozaffarian’s Tufts Food Compass, educating the public on the virtues of a high-sugar, high-carbohydrate diet. The Food Compass would be released only days apart from the highly publicized rollout of an anti-obesity product under the guise of a news show, which was not only funded through advertising but also had on its payroll all of the experts who had been interviewed for the segment. Next, it was announced that new conclusions had been reached in the medical community, where obesity was not the result of individual lifestyle choices, but a “brain disease,” while diabetes wasn’t the result of sugar and carbohydrates but too much meat. Also in January 2023, the AAP, for the first time in fifteen years, changed its guidelines to recommend that pediatricians prescribe anti-obesity drugs to children beginning at the age of twelve years old.
In 2022, Novo Nordisk made $8 billion in profits with a profit margin of 31 percent. In comparison, non-drug companies earned an average profit margin of 4.5 percent.
Even higher earnings are expected in 2023 with the rollout of Wegovy, which is exactly the same drug—just at a higher dosage—as Nordisk’s older and more widely available anti-obesity weight loss drug Ozempic, all but assuring the company will continue to reach record profits well into the future.
Panic over the 2020 COVID-19 respiratory virus provided another example of how the Medical Industrial Complex colluded with other industrial interests, this time under pressure from government authorities.
Shortly after the start of the outbreak, it had become obvious that those afflicted with obesity and diabetes were the only people under fifty years of age at serious risk. And yet no health authority made any attempt to remedy either affliction. On the contrary, the recommendations from leading health authorities seemed more optimized to make people fatter and more vulnerable. Large segments of the population were locked down at home, while playgrounds were chained shut and gyms closed, denying them exposure to essential sunlight. Meanwhile, nearly nothing was mentioned about diet.
It proved to be an ideal climate for launching the most profitable pharmaceutical product in world history. During the outbreak, millions of people sat at home, filling their bodies with junk foods as their waistlines expanded, further increasing their risk of the virus. For many, their entire worlds had been hijacked by fiat institutions.
In 2020, the resources of the fiat printing press were mobilized toward the push of a relentless, media-led propaganda campaign touting the “safe and effective” COVID vaccine while, at the same time, coordinating with social media institutions to ban non-conformist opinions and debate on the nature, seriousness, and treatment of the illnesses.
In May 2021, McDonald’s, one of the nation’s leading enablers of obesity, began a partnership with the Biden Administration on a campaign to advocate government-endorsed pharmaceutical products. Packaging on the food and drinks from the McDonald’s, “We Can Do This” campaign directed customers to a website promoting the government-endorsed pharmaceutical product, while another link led them to schedule an appointment to receive their injection of the latest pharmaceutical merchandise. The multibillion-dollar “public education campaign” included ads on television, radio, online, and social media platforms.
Genna Gent, McDonald’s USA Vice President for global public policy and government relations, explained in a statement that, “McDonald’s is excited to be doing our part for the people we serve, providing them with simple information that can help keep them safe.” While touting the new packaging, notably absent from the statement was the health and safety implications of McDonald’s food itself.
Meanwhile, McDonald’s, through a complicated scheme of offshore enterprises, continues to pay a significantly lower corporate income tax rate than its smaller, less-established competitors, a form of tax avoidance that remains perfectly legal and protected by American law. However, McDonald’s is not alone. To survive in a fiat world, nearly every major business in America is forced to delegate resources akin to that of Gent’s “public policy and government relations” position in order to remain in the favored class and maintain the good graces of authority.
McDonald’s may have profited from an avalanche of great publicity, but the real winner would be the Medical Industrial Complex. In the fight against the COVID-19 respiratory virus, the United States government awarded $2 billion to a single vaccine manufacturer, Moderna, for research and development and another $10 billion on procurement. Meanwhile, Moderna was paid between $15 and $26 a dose for a product that only costs $2.85 per dose to manufacture.
However, no new taxes needed to be raised to cover the $12 billion expenditure. The money would be created. No explanation was offered on why the same pound of pork chops that cost $.59 per pound in 1970, by 2020 would cost $4.17.
Meanwhile, the newly created money flowed into the coffers of industry CEOs. Since 2020, Moderna has made over $20 billion in profits. In 2022, Moderna’s Board of Directors approved a nearly $1 billion golden parachute for its CEO Stephane Bancel. However, Bancel was only one of several new billionaires created by the virus. Ugur Sahin, the CEO of BioNTech, which produced a vaccine with Pfizer, reportedly has an estimated net worth of $4billion while countless other investors in Moderna also became billionaires as shares skyrocketed.
Contributing to the windfall is the favored tax status awarded to industry leaders. In 2021, Moderna paid a 7 percent tax rate, well below the statutory rate of 21 percent.
The Medical Industrial Complex is afforded another advantage by the federal government in being awarded immunity from legal action. According to forty-two US Code 300aa–22, “No vaccine manufacturer shall be liable in a civil action for damages arising from a vaccine-related injury or death associated with the administration of a vaccine after October 1, 1988,if the injury or death resulted from side effects that were unavoidable, even though the vaccine was properly prepared and was accompanied by proper directions and warnings.”
In February 2020, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar invoked the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act, which had the effect of shielding vaccine manufacturers from liability in the event someone had an allergic reaction, injury, or death after being vaccinated. Finally, when compliance didn’t reach satisfactory levels, brute force of regulations and threat of job loss that the government, working in tandem with the Medical Industrial Complex, coerced citizens into injecting its newest line of products.
As its stated reason for necessitating its need, Big Pharma and a bipartisan group of government officials assured the public that taking the vaccine prevented the infection while also stopping its spread, both of which later proved demonstrably false.
Meanwhile, Americans claiming to suffer from adverse side effects as a result of injecting their bodies with a product they were coerced into taking were left with no legal recourse. In 2021 alone, there were more than 700,000reports of adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System database.
Just as many people had lost the ability to tell that junk makes them fat and meat makes them healthy, because of the fiat mindset, they expected to beat a respiratory virus with government decrees, cloth facial coverings, toxic injections, and lockdowns. At every step, the government became more powerful, inflation rose higher, and medical authorities got richer, while the American people became poorer and sicker.
The profit incentive of the Medical Industrial Complex is not to see people get healthier but to see them get sicker. Spawned by a decision to debase its money supply, the government fiat system has corrupted the science of nutrition, empowered the anti-meat and environmental religious groups to shape our concepts of food, and perverted the price incentives of how Americans eat through its alliance with the Agro-Industrial Complex. In fiat, markets are prevented from adjusting as they would under a hard currency and instead become a force of coercion.
Positioned at the end of a long line of fiat nutrition benefactors stands the Medical Industrial Complex, spearheaded by Big Pharma, in which a sick nation serves its ultimate end goals. In this model, the real product being sold is the sickness of the American people. And its consumers are the corporate entities who profit from human misery.
“A collectivist tyranny dare not enslave a country by an outright confiscation of its values, material or moral. It has to be done through a process of internal corruption. Just as in the material realm the plundering of a country’s wealth is accomplished by inflating the currency so today one may witness the process of inflation being applied to the realm of rights.”
The personal integrity of human life has been collateral damage for a fiat system that requires the infantilization of its people for the perpetuation of its own survival. Fiat necessitates a systematic attempt to separate actions from consequences, a form of mental sabotage which usurps the reasoning mechanism of the human mind. It leads to a confused, compliant public, eager to follow the dictate of any voice capable of punching through the fog.
Foundational to an individual’s self-ownership is the perception that they control their own health. That through the foods they eat, they can grow strong. That in illness, they are equipped with tools necessary to heal. Foundational to fiat is human dependence, surviving of a system that slowly drains the wealth of the many to the benefit of the few. Tat the expertise of authority serves as a substitute for one’s own decision making. Consequently, the role of personal responsibility as the primary driver of obesity and related chronic diseases has been sidelined, replaced by assurances from fiat health authorities that negative health outcomes are due to circumstances outside of one’s control.
In the past, establishment arguments often centered around social conditioning. The most recent iteration centers around genetics . . . that obesity is a “brain disease” (as discussed in Chapter 11: Government Institutionalization). Shifting the blame for personal health outside the realm of human behavior and choice affirms that people have no control over the most basic outcomes of their own lives, and an opening then emerges for someone or something to take that control for them.
A human mind cannot not perform on the premise of its own incompetence. If a person acquires the conviction that their ability to act on the most primary of human tasks (the health and maintenance of one’s own body) is hopeless and that control over their physical and mental well-being has been placed in the hands of others, then the battle has already been lost. Human life has become monetized, becoming yet another product serving the interests of authority. Consequently, a prerequisite of self-ownership is the free access of information needed for people to make the correct decisions in how to achieve a healthy life.
In today’s highly curated information landscape in which authorities have colluded to suppress information that goes against preordained narratives, the American citizenry can only be held partly responsible for their dietary choices. As discussed in previous chapters, several of the most respected nutrition scientists in the country have been the subject of bribes, committed acts of fraud, or most commonly, highlighted only the information that reinforces desired results while ignoring studies that would go against the “consensus.” From the data points manipulated by Ancel Keys that first gave birth to the heart-diet hypothesis and the unscientific Adventist observational studies touting the evils of meat, to the pay-to-play schemes from renowned Harvard nutritionists Frederick Stare and Mark Hegsted, who would later go on to create the nation’s food policy, the field of nutrition has been mired in shoddy science, religious influence, and corruption at nearly every step of its evolution. However, the most instructive example can be found in the Minnesota Coronary Survey.
The survey was primed to be the definitive test that would finally prove Ancel Keys’s diet-heart hypothesis. Beginning in 1968, researchers carried out controlled clinical trials in six mental health hospitals and one nursing home in a study that lasted four and a half years under the belief that it would validate Keys’s diet-heart hypothesis once and for all.
Previous to the survey, the only available data supporting the diet-heart hypothesis had come entirely from a series of poorly controlled epidemiological studies, also known as observational studies, which relied on surveys and at best, could establish correlation not causation.
The Minnesota Coronary Survey was different. More than 9,400 men and women, ages twenty to ninety-seven, participated with data on serum cholesterol available on more than 2,300 participants. The study was led by a close colleague of Keys, Dr. Ivan Frantz Jr. of the University of Minnesota Medical School, with Keys serving as its co-leader.
In what would be one of the largest controlled clinical dietary trials of its kind ever conducted, researchers were able to tightly regulate the diets of the institutionalized study subjects, half of which were fed meals rich in saturated fats from milk, cheese, and beef, while the remaining group was fed a diet in which saturated fat was removed and replaced with corn oil. It would mark the first time the diet-heart hypothesis would be tested in a randomized controlled study, the gold standard in science, meaning that enough variables could be controlled to potentially establish a true causal relationship.
However, at the conclusion of the survey in 1973, it was as if a bomb had dropped on the heads of the researchers. The figures had revealed that “for the entire study population, no differences between the treatment and control groups were observed for cardiovascular events, cardiovascular deaths, or total mortality.”181Te results were devastating for Keys, his diet-heart hypothesis, as well as the near entirety of the nutritional field, which had embraced them. For more than a decade, Keys and his colleagues had been the subject of countless newspaper articles, magazine covers, and television interviews where they confidently assured the public that they had solved the heart-health riddle.
There was no doubt, Keys often repeated, that the wave of heart attacks that had crippled the country could be attributed to the consumption of the saturated fats found in meat, eggs, and whole milk, which would in turn cause high cholesterol, clogging the arteries. But now the data gathered from the most comprehensive study ever conducted on the subject had refuted his theory and done so in spectacular fashion. If Keys and his colleagues were going to save their reputations, a concerted effort would need to be undertaken to prevent the study results from reaching the broader scientific community and more importantly, the public. As it turned out, that is exactly what they did. The results of the study remained concealed for the next sixteen years.
In 1989, a full nine years after the diet-heart hypothesis had been used as the cornerstone for the nation’s nutrition policy and causing millions to change their diets, the study results were finally published but in an obscure medical journal with few readers. The tactic proved effective. If anyone had noticed the results, it barely elicited a peep. The promotion of a low-fat diet of grains, vegetable oils, and sugar continued, as did the vilification of red meat.
In 2016, Christopher Ramsden, a medical investigator at the National Institutes of Health, became curious about what had happened to the survey. He had read in the literature that the study had been conducted but was unable to find any trace of its results. After Ramsden inquired, the university informed him that while the study’s lead researcher, Ivan Franz, had passed, they could put him in touch with Franz’s son, Robert. Robert was happy to oblige and searched his father’s house, where in the basement a box marked “Minnesota Coronary Survey” was discovered.
The data inside resulted in a complete and total evisceration of Keys’s diet-heart hypothesis, revealing that not only was there no decreased risk of death from substituting animal fats for vegetable oils but instead showed an increased mortality rate for those on the “heart healthy” diet. Furthermore, those who had the greater reduction in serum cholesterol, a measurement of the total amount of cholesterol in the blood, had a higher rate of death.
Robert Franz couldn’t make sense out of the findings. “When it turned out that it didn’t reduce risk, it was quite puzzling,” he told the New York Times. “And since it was effective in lowering cholesterol, it was weird.”
Still, many in the scientific community refused to believe the results could be true. Dr. Daisy Zamora, a research scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, analyzed four similar trials that tested the effects of replacing saturated fat with vegetable oils rich, with all four also failing to show any reduction in mortality from heart disease.
“One would expect that the more you lowered cholesterol, the better the outcome,” said Dr. Ramsden. “But in this case, the opposite association was found. The greater degree of cholesterol-lowering was associated with a higher, rather than a lower, risk of death.”
When years later one of the study’s principal investigators was asked why the study was never made public, he told science journalist Gary Taubes that while there wasn’t anything wrong with the research, the decision was made to conceal the results because “we were just so disappointed in the way they turned out.”
It would be impossible to overstate the implications resulting from Franz, Keys, and their fellow researchers withholding the findings from the Minnesota Coronary Survey from the public. For decades, Americans had been told that high cholesterol in the blood was shortening life spans. An entire dietary system had been built around the premise that foods that caused a rise in cholesterol were bad, while ones that lowered cholesterol were good. However, the most conclusive and extensive study ever conducted on the subject indicated the opposite to be true.
The possibility exists that if research showing evidence that low cholesterol diets led to a higher mortality rates had been published at the conclusion of the study in 1973, it would have had the potential to change the trajectory of diet-heart research along with the federal food policy of an entire nation and most importantly, empowered individuals to make better informed decisions of what was in their own health interests.
However, that alternative reality would never exist. Instead, the vital health information was withheld from a public that continues to be told that meat is bad, vegetable oils are good, and low cholesterol is optimal for health. The carnage that has resulted and continues to this day as a result of this deceit is impossible to quantify, as are the number of diseases and illnesses that could have been averted and lives saved.
The censorship of heretical ideas and the limiting of information for which the broader public had access became increasingly prevalent in the 2010s, growing in both scope and power, and having accelerated through the collusion between technology industries with government authorities seeking to control the narrative.
Today’s biggest proponents, enablers, and enforcers of censorship are the trillion-dollar tech monopolists: Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple. Under the guise of protecting the public from “misinformation,” tech monopolists have allied with government authorities to censor, silence, and de-platform those with whom they allege to espouse dangerous heretical views that run counter to mainstream consensus. For example, in the midst of the COVID-19 respiratory virus, social media companies successfully censored opinions,185 including data from health officials and scientists purporting to show potential links between Vitamin D and Zinc, both of which are commonly found in red meat and whole milk, and their relation to positive health outcomes of those infected.
Medical journals where scientific studies are published have devolved into high-brow, infomercial campaigns for the pharmaceutical industry that funds their existence.
In 2003, Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet wrote, “The business climate for most modern medical journals, whether in the for-profit or nonproft sector, is strongly pro-pharmaceutical industry. . . . In this environment, I know that it can be difficult for editors to raise questions about the ethics and marketing tactics of pharmaceutical companies.”
In one example, a study published in The Lancet in May 2020 claimed that hydroxychloroquine’s use to treat COVID-19 was ineffective and led to “an increased risk of in-hospital mortality.” After the results were published, trials testing hydroxychloroquine, a drug safely used for half a century, costs pennies, and which has been shown to be a potent inhibitor of COVID-19 infection, were shut down. It would later be revealed that the study had been fabricated. The Lancet was forced to retract the article but not before a more expensive and profitable pharmaceutical alternative had been mainstreamed into the American public.
In 2021, it was taken a step further after the United States government delegated fiat funds toward the creation of an online propaganda effort employed to de-license doctors who conveyed “misinformation,” which at the time had been been loosely defined as anything contrary to advice from the World Health Organization or the CDC. One of the CDC-funded groups, Shots Heard, labeled itself a “rapid-response digital cavalry dedicated to protecting the online safety of health care providers and practices.” According to its website, Shots Heard has also been aligned with the Public Good Projects(PGP), a “public health nonproft specializing in large-scale media monitoring programs, social and behavior change interventions.”
Trough the initiation of pressure campaigns, the groups have claimed responsibility for the suspension of doctors and medical professionals who failed to adequately endorse, or as was more prevalent, offered opinions contrary to the government solution of a population-wide mandatory injection of the Medical Industrial Complex’s most recent product.
For its efforts, the CDC core public health program level was awarded 8.4 billion in fiat dollars for 2022. No new taxes needed to be raised to cover this expenditure. No explanation was offered on why the same McDonald’s Big Mac that in 1970 cost 65 cents by 2022 would cost $5.93.
On August 15, 1971, the nation accepted the unspoken premise that it was authorities who were better suited to be in control of the money as opposed to the individual citizen who earned it. In adopting the 1980 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the nation accepted the unspoken premise that it was the authorities who were better equipped to define what constituted healthy food, as opposed to the people who ate it. In 2021, the American people accepted the next natural evolution, this time in outsourcing their self-governance when it came to the medical decisions involving their own bodies.
