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More and more evidence is coming out almost daily about how we’ve been SCAMMED in a big way by Big Pharma and Big Food. You’d think with the advancement of technology and time, we as a planet would be getting healthier. NOT! In fact, the evidence is quite the opposite. The more industrialized food and medicine has become, our metabolic and mental health has fallen apart and the FACTS show it. Join me for a red pill conversation with health advocate and co-founder of truemed.com, Calley Means.
Check out Calley’s work here: https://www.truemed.com and https://calleymeans.com
Transcript:
Hey Gorgeous, if you want success on your fertility journey, you’ve got to have the mindset for it. It’s time to kick fear, negativity, doubt, shame, jealousy, and the whole clown car of low vibe fertility journey BS to the curb. I’m your host, Roseanne Austin, fertility mindset master, former prosecutor and recovering type A control freak perfectionist.
I use the power of mindset to get pregnant naturally and have my baby boy at 43. Despite years of fertility treatment failure, I help women across the globe beat the odds on their fertility journey, just like I did. Get ready for a quick hit of confidence, joy, feminine badassery, and loads of hell yes for your fertility journey.
It’s time to get fearless, baby. Fearlessly fertile. Let’s do this. Welcome to the Fearlessly Fertile Podcast, episode 229, Disrupt the Big Farm, a Big Food Matrix, a conversation with Callie Means. My loves, I’m so excited that we have a really special guest this week and his name is Callie Means. And I came into his acquaintance from watching him on Russell Brand’s podcast, and I just was blown away.
And Callie is really an advocate for health, both on the metabolic front and the way that we approach the, kind of the big pharma, big medicine model. And what I loved about what Callie had to share on Russell’s show was just really talking about, it’s kind of a scam, ladies. It’s kind of a scam. We’re all waking up to the scam of, you know, so much of what we’ve been told about our own empowerment, how much power we have when it comes to our own health, but also what we’ve been told about food.
I mean, if you’ve been paying any attention, to news reports over the past year about, you know, food pyramids featuring frosted flakes as somehow being more healthy than a piece of red meat. Like, it’s fucking crazy. Like, anybody, I mean, and this is not political. It’s really not any of those things. It’s not like you have to take a side.
It’s really just common sense. Like, does this make sense? that a bowl of cornflakes or frosted flakes or whatever, you know, happens to be promoted by big food. Like, is that actually loaded with chemicals? Somehow, truly, you know, through your own assessment as a thinking sentient human being, Is that’s really more healthy than a piece of red meat and butter and eggs?
Like, you know, just let that run around in your head for a little bit. We’ve also found out that there’s a lot of shit we’ve been told about medicine, you know, not just pharmaceuticals, but medicine, like that is just mind blowingly different than what it actually is proven to be. And, and you can use your own deduction and, and thought process to figure that out, because so much of it is coming out in the news.
Like, you can just pick almost anything and find out that the rug has been pulled out from underneath a lot of what we’ve been told when it comes to our health, from sleep, From pharmaceuticals, from diet, from what to consume, what not to consume. You know, and I know as women on this journey, you’re consuming a lot of this information, but my work is really about helping women think differently on this journey.
And we’ve seen this play out. I mean, seriously, you have heard 200 plus episodes on this podcast so far, most of which are about women beating the odds when medicine has told them it was not possible. Some of these women, you’ve heard them yourself, less than 1 percent chance, and over the past few weeks alone, you have heard multiple stories.
of women with, like, a single embryo winning, okay? So many people being bogged down with so much fear mongering, you can’t do it, here’s why, here’s what the statistics show, that I thought it would be great to have Callie on to really continue. To help you empower yourself because Kali is actually the co founder of something called TrueMed.
It will be launching soon. He also has a book coming out and he’s been making his rounds on different podcasts and really helping people disrupt the narrative that they have no power, that whatever the government or big pharma, big food is telling you is the only way to see it when it’s clearly not.
Okay, so I really hope that you will listen to this interview with Callie Means with an open heart and think critically about what you have heard in the past, see how that measures up with what you’re hearing here, and then make a decision as an intelligent woman to start doing some of your own investigation, start doing your own research.
Look, because this isn’t just about getting pregnant, this is about staying pregnant, this is also about being a great mom once this baby’s born. Are you really going to just throw them into the system that says you need XYZ and that’s the only way you’re going to be healthy? Or are you going to educate yourself up front, be a mama bear advocate?
Ask questions and use that brain the good Lord gave you, okay, to make a decision about whether or not you want your kids eating that or taking that or being injected with that, okay? You have fought long and hard to bring this baby here, so get that wonderful brain of yours working in that noggin as we disrupt the Big Pharma and Big Food Matrix with Cali Meats.
Here’s my conversation. Yeah, well, so why don’t you start off by just sharing a little bit with the women listening about your background and how you found yourself in this rather unique position that you’re in 100%. So I have an interesting background here. I think to come to this space talking about fertility.
So I grew up in Washington, D. C. And dreamed of being in politics. So You know, I think for the right reasons, very ideological about American competitiveness, you know, studied economics at Stanford and went into campaigns. And inevitably what I learned is after the campaigns, both on the left and the right, people go into political consulting, basically public affairs, consulting, lobbying, and the biggest vendors in DC, where I was again, With people that were on the other side of the aisle on the other campaign, we’re both in working for pharma and food.
Pharma spends five times more than the oil industry in Washington, D. C., and food is the number two biggest spender. So did that, wasn’t really for me, got more in entrepreneurship. And then, you know, two big events happened, uh, in the past couple of years. My sister is really my hero. It was really the pride of the family was, uh, Stanford med school president of her Stanford class, which, which she went after, I lost it.
Uh, you know, she was just kind of did everything better than me. It was on the medical ladder, which, you know, you know, which everyone strives for. And she then learned something. And this really kind of sets the context of what brings us to fertility and brings, I think, to the biggest issue in the world, which is that, you know, at med schools, 90 percent of the curriculum is in pharmacology, and she saw these patients, she was a head and neck surgeon and they, you know, in for some inflammation of the sinuses, but she looked at their charts and they were dealing with depression.
They were dealing with pre diabetes or diabetes. They were on a statin for high cholesterol. They were on a blood pressure medication and inevitably, and this is something she was very passionate about seeing a lot of her friends. Struggling with infertility issues, both men and women. Inevitably, they had some fertility issues too.
And the way the medical system works, as Casey’s talked about, my sister, when a doctor graduates, they choose between 42 specialties and then there’s 82 set of specialties. So we’ve siloed the body. And that’s actually very profitable, so that patient she saw, you know, who had all those comorbidities, all those medications, they went to a different doctor for each.
And what she kind of discovered, and I think there’s a real awakening on, is that really if you trace PCOS, if you trace high cholesterol, if you trace high fasting glucose, which goes to diabetes, even depression, there’s a real root cause. Our body is connected, and it really relates to insulin resistance.
and metabolic dysfunction. And the metabolic dysfunction, which is also at the root of autoimmune conditions and, and, and eight of the 10 largest killers of Americans, really almost any chronic disease you can point to, which now drives 85 percent of healthcare costs. You know, you can really, it’s this radical insight.
It’s very simple, but Casey found you can really do some dietary interventions, do some exercises, interventions that really attack the whole thing that was met with. violent opposition in the medical system. They actually said the phrase, and this is just quoting, but her, uh, her boss said, quote, don’t be a pussy.
And, uh, we didn’t go to nutrition school. We are doing serious medical interventions. We do IVF. We do surgery to relieve sinus pressure. We do prescribing of statins. And anyway, she started a metabolic health company called Levels, which actually many people struggling with PCOS or actually have seen a lot of, a lot of success on, which we can dive into, and I was very inspired, and really the catalyst for me was my mother, our mom, passing away in early 2021, also due to metabolic dysfunction.
She, and just a quick story on her, her, her, It actually starts with fertility, and so she had years of, uh, fertility challenges when she was trying to give birth to me, then she had gestational diabetes. I was actually born at 12 pounds, which is a huge sign of insulin resistance, which is also the underpinning, which is pretty definitive now, of PCOS and fertility issues.
And she was getting high fives at the hospital for having such a large baby, you know, and then like normal rites of passages for an American, you know, had high fasting glucose, took a metformin, statins, blood pressure, and inevitably got diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died several weeks later. What, what I’m on this journey for is that I think the, the, the things at the early end, if her infertility, if her, you know, gestational diabetes, if that was not just something to treat, something to take a pill, something that was unlucky, if you actually, and we have curiosity about these symptoms and what they actually represent, they’re all connected and we can actually welcome them as warning signs and potential metabolic dysfunction happening Within our body, but our system doesn’t do that.
And I think it’s a huge issue, which is leading to 93 percent of the country being metabolic dysfunction. Now, high rates of depression, it’s all connected. So my company’s trying to incentivize actually, you know, for PCOS and other metabolic conditions, actual food and exercise interventions. Which can actually get paid for by tax advantaged medical dollars.
You can actually prescribe food as medicine, exercise as medicine. The medical system doesn’t know how to do this, but it does count, and that’s where we need to move healthcare. It’s not an anti drug message I’m on. Obviously, obviously there’s multifactorial issues here, but food and lifestyle, this isn’t preventative.
These are the best reversal mechanisms for almost any chronic condition, including many types of infertility, I think. Yeah. And you know, that’s really interesting to me because I was on my own fertility journey and when the subject of diet and all these other things came up, the first thing was, uh, nah, nah, nah, there’s not enough data to support that.
And I’m like, Well, this is something I’m doing every day, you know, and it wasn’t until I sought out the alleged alternative medicine where that conversation even began. My memory serves, I had heard that very little time in like maybe a short seminar in medical school has, you know, even covers nutrition that you have to actually go outside of the typical allopathic medicine to start hearing more consistent and different messaging about food.
And the role that it can play. Yeah, it’s amazing. And you say it exactly right. The, you know, talking about nutrition, talking about the one ton of genetic information I call it, that we put into our bodies is considered niche and you can really trace the financial incentive. So 80 percent of medical schools in the United States today, that includes Stanford med school, Harvard med school on down.
Do not require a single nutrition class for doctors to graduate today. So 80 to 90 percent of doctors by, by an estimate actually from Harvard Public Health says that a doctor’s today graduate without a single nutrition class. Meanwhile, 80 to 90 percent of all the curriculum is essentially around pharmacology.
And when you tie the money, more than 50 percent of major medical school funding actually somehow Touches pharma. Um, they’re obviously the main, you know, donators of of research and and and through a lot of different ways through grants fund the medical schools when it comes to food, food companies, processed food companies fund nutrition research 11 times more than the NIH.
So and then that bleeds into medical medical schools and curriculum. Food companies also have donated millions of dollars to the core medical groups that set the standard of care for American doctors from the American Diabetes Association, which is really hard to wrap your head around. The majority of the American Diabetes Association funding comes from pharma, and they accept millions of dollars from Coca Cola, which is literally, if you were to take one product, that has led to the explosion of diabetes to 50 percent of adults having pre diabetes or diabetes, which is highly tied to the fact that infertility both for women and for men with sperm count plummeting is skyrocketing.
I think it’s sugary drinks and, uh, and the American Diabetes Association is accepting money from them, including the The organization that sets nutrition principles and the American Academy of Pediatrics takes money from processed food and is a majority funded by pharma. So that’s just how the system works.
And I think the key thing to understand, and let’s, let’s not be conspiratorial. Let’s just talk about the raw, let’s just talk about the raw economics here. Let’s take a fertility clinic and let’s take the idea that PCOS and a lot of fertility issues really can be reversed and prevented through food and dietary interventions.
Somebody that’s on that journey. Right? Somebody that’s on that journey. Or take an obesity clinic. You know, somebody on a journey through food and lifestyle. Or take a diabetes clinic. To take really any area of medicine, they’re laying people off if people are on that journey. Somebody that’s on a journey of food and lifestyle, they’re not a profitable patient.
Somebody who needs, you know, these fertility clinics, IVF and the infertility issues are skyrocketing. I think it’s demonstrable this is because of food and lifestyle issues. And, you know, there’s everywhere we go, there’s new wings, there’s new people being hired, you know, the loans for the new buildings are underwritten by growth and assumed growth in these procedures, job hiring plans.
I talked to a You know, the leading institution, fertility specialist, and he said if I could snap my fingers and cure infertility tomorrow among my patients, among women, I would do that. But I, as a, as a manager at a leading institution, I’ll have to lay people off. People will lose their jobs if this doesn’t grow.
And you know, I, I think the kind of. Problem with the system is, of course, a fertility doctor who’s, who’s in that exact moment helping, um, somebody conceive through an invasive procedure. That, that’s a miracle. That’s awesome. But nobody, and I really do mean nobody, in the, in the infrastructure of health, Is asking why is fertility going up so much?
Why is diabetes going up so much? Why are our immune conditions going up so much? Why, why are all these things going up at the same time? It’s because of food, which I think should be obvious to all of us, but that is a radical, that is a radical insight to the medical system. And it’s a question nobody’s incentivized to ask because everyone’s profiting off the metabolic dysfunction that we’re all facing.
It’s incredible, you know, and it’s funny, not that long ago, I was looking at old family pictures, you know, I was born in the seventies and I looked, I’m like, everybody’s thin, like everybody’s thin, everybody looks healthy. And you’ve got to ask yourself what’s different. Like, what is different? What has happened, you know, over the decades?
I mean, food, it just seems like the quality of food, like it’s just changed. Yeah. And this is what I’ve really been. And again, I come from, came from this really from my early days in politics. I care about the future of this country. And I just kind of have this simple insight from my sister and kind of going down the rabbit hole.
And that’s the most important issue. Is that. Something’s happening to us, and you know, when we have an 80 percent obesity or overweight rate among American adults, 50 percent pre diabetes or diabetes, these are astronomical kind of rates, and I would also add, our reproductive abilities, which is such, you know, the most important evolutionary function we have.
Are degrading at a staggering rate. I mean, we are becoming systematically more overweight, sicker, more depressed. I mean, 25 percent of adult women in the United States are on a, are on a mental health medication, which is, you know, not, not a value judgment really, but, but just like that is a massive societal dynamic, right?
And then, uh, fertility among men and women is, is absolutely skyrocketing. So, just from a kind of American competitive standpoint, it’s like demonstrable, like that, that’s like the highest leverage thing we have. And it’s like, it’s, it’s cause of food and related metabolic habits, which is, which are the simple things.
Let’s just take them. So on food, um, our diet, our foundational diet is three products. It’s three ingredients that did not exist 120 years ago. So if you look at any item, you know, at the supermarket, you’re, you’re most likely to find highly processed grains, added sugar and seed oils. This is 75 percent of food in America, ultra processed food, and those are the core ingredients.
Highly processed grains were invented 110 years ago. The processing is taking the fiber off, modifying it, taking a lot of nutrition out so it’s shelf stable. It also essentially turns into sugar in our blood because the fiber blunts the glucose impact. Then added sugar, we all know about that, but it’s 100x up in 100 years, which is just staggering, just doing violence to ourselves.
And then seed oils, which I call industrial byproduct, they’re actually, it’s actually literally was created by John Rockefeller in the early 1900s as byproduct for oil. And it’s much cheaper than good fats like olive oil, avocado oil, butter, things like that. And that’s the, you look into even items from whole foods, you’ll see canola oil or soybean oil that’s doing real like serious damage to our cells.
And that’s. Actually, in Nixon in the 70s, you can trace it. We dramatically, like, subsidized a monocrop agriculture, you know, subsidy things with an initial good intention to help with hunger, but it ran amok and we’ve actually been incentivizing a monocropping ultra processed food system starting in the 70s.
And then as you said, you can really just trace the obesity epidemic. Right from there, just real quickly, sleep. I don’t think we fully realize this. The average sleep for an American has gone down three hours in a hundred years, three hours. It’s gone from, it’s gone from, um, a little bit over nine to a little bit over six, six below seven.
That’s significant. And you know, that’s another podcast, but that has a lot to do with our overall metabolic health and then sedentary behavior. Now food is number one, but sleep and sedentary behavior is really important. Not only You know, I think we’re trying to exercise. I personally, my thing is, I think we all need to exercise because we’ve taken away movement from our daily lives.
But the real problem is that we’ve taken away movement. You know, movement just used to be part of our lives. Kids used to play outside much more. School used to be more dynamic. Now we sit, both children and adults, in desks all day. And just that daily movement, the daily walking, that is being robbed from our lives, systematically, when you look at the statistics.
And that’s a huge problem. And the last thing I’ll say, which impacts fertility and everything else is chronic stress. You know, we’ve, we’ve talked, you know, and, and, and we all know about this, but it is evolutionarily unprecedented that we have, you know, a phone throughout all hours of the day, just constantly designed to trigger.
Kind of that fight or flight really. And I think our modern society does trigger those parts of the brain that are, you know, running from tigers and that really increase cortisol, but that’s happening systematically at all hours of the day. And that actually scientifically has a huge impact on ourselves.
You know, with our body in that state, chronically, which is happening systematically. So those are the main levers that are impacting metabolic health. And my message is this, it sounds complicated to change, but it’s really not. I mean, this is very important. 25 percent of kids now having prediabetes, diabetes.
You know, the, the obesity rates, the chronic disease rates, it’s bankrupting our country. It’s making, it’s really hobbling our citizens. I think infertility and fertility issues should be the biggest warning sign we have with how many, how much that’s going up. And there are ways we can change this to incentivize better food to, and, you know, to, to educate children about sleep, to educate children about mindfulness and, and, and ways to deal with chronic stress and to encourage a more, uh, active society.
So I actually, it sounds idealistic, but we have to do that. And, and I think it’s, it’s, it’s a really a moral blind spot, a financially motivated moral blind spot. And this is my message, you know, to your audience, you know, obviously this is a very personal multifaceted journey on fertility, but you are being lied to by your doctor and it is completely medically inaccurate for them not to be putting these issues front and center.
And if they’re pushing you into an intervention, or you feel that your gut is probably right, and that is financially motivated, and there are root cause options that should be first, that are ways to prevent, but also reverse, uh, there’s, there’s absolutely mind blowing studies, to me, on reversal PCOS and, and other conditions.
PCOS, you know, Tell me if this doesn’t ring, ring for you, but, you know, very highly tied to insulin resistance. Oh yeah. Which is highly tied to food. So. Yeah. Well, and it’s interesting because if we go back to something that you said, I mean, making the logical, you know, like sort of conclusion based on who’s pulling the strings and who’s putting the money in the system, that is a hundred, that’s just some simple, basic critical thinking skills, Callie.
Like who is funding this? Asking yourself that very simple question, where are these studies coming from? Like, it absolutely floored me a few months back when I saw a meme about how frosted flakes or some cereal was somehow more nutritious than meat. It was like meat and eggs. And I was like, I thought it was a joke when I first saw that.
I’m like, who, what? And then when you look that that’s the government putting that information out, like, who’s funding that? That, I mean, even if you had no background in nutrition or any, like, medical science whatsoever, I think any reasonable thinking person would take, would Take that and just, Hmm, that’s interesting.
You’re going to tell me that something that’s highly processed, covered in sugar, shelf stable for a few years is somehow more nutritious than a piece of meat or an egg. Oh my gosh. Yeah. And, uh, it sounds ridiculous and it sounds like a, like a funny meme, almost like a, like an onion article online. That study saying Lucky Charms, I think Fruit Loops 2, healthier than beef and eggs.
It was overall, it was, uh, It was several dozen name brand cereals recommended and then chicken, fried, uh, sorry, excuse me, grilled organic chicken, beef, eggs, fresh eggs, all, uh, rated as discouraged. That study is the preeminent NIH nutrition study, funded millions of dollars by our government. I think it actually alludes to what the problem is.
There’s a couple elements. One is that the NIH is primarily a grant making organization. So it’s 90 percent of the funding. And it’s really not often NIH bureaucrats get Making those decisions, they have panels, so they have like panels on nutrition, panels on opioids, panels on obesity. You know, going back 10 years when I was actually working for Pharma, we actually helped put together a list for an opioid committee from the NIH.
And 80 percent of that panel was directly conflicted, directly paid by opioid makers, and they, uh, Recommended lenient, you know, opioid guidelines. And now, you know, we know there’s a huge crisis with that. It’s, I don’t, I don’t know if many folks know that over 90 percent of people that die of an opioid overdose today from, you know, fentanyl or illicit opioids, their addiction started on a legal prescription pad because of those loose guidelines that were created 10 years ago by a conflicted panel at the NIH that was created.
Set the guidelines and funneled a lot of research money. Now it’s the same kind of thing for food. You have, you know, on the, on the USDA nutrition guideline committees, the US recommendations for Americans that funnel into all other kind of guidelines and public policy, 95 percent of the experts that created the 2020 guidelines.
At a direct payment from either pharma or food companies on many both. So, so that’s a, just a key thing to understand. And the bureaucrats themselves, and this is just shocking, but the bureaucrats themselves at the NIH are able to take personal payments from food and pharma companies and do the recent report from Pope publica, uh, said that the majority of folks who do pharma research, nutrition research, same thing do.
The author of that NIH funded study has taken personal payments not only from large processed food companies, but he’s also taken money from one of the leading direct to consumer prescribers of Ozempic, which is, uh, which is to profit off obesity. So you really, like, you actually just can’t really make it up.
And you just kind of, I mean, I hope my goal is that this isn’t this is kind of like crazy to kind of hear this, but I hope it’s actually an empowering message because I think we all like understand that there’s probably something wrong. None of this really makes sense, but we’re kind of gaslighted not to really ask questions.
But I think we need to like tear this down a little bit and understand like the medical organizations in this country have lost all moral authority. I think particularly when it comes to chronic conditions such as infertility, heart disease, diabetes, they deserve no benefit of the doubt. I mean, you should listen to your doctor.
You should absolutely talk to your doctor. You should, you know, weigh the pros and cons of certain, you know, procedures. But we should absolutely, they deserve no benefit at the doubt. We should be very skeptical, you know, radical radicalizing ourselves and, you know, reading books by Mark Hyman, Robert Lustig, you’re, you know, and many podcasts like yours and many others, just to at least think for ourselves, you know, in the face of mass and fertility, mass chronic disease, mass obesity, we’re being told to, to be quiet, trust the science and not ask any questions.
That’s ridiculous. Like that needs to stop. So I think, I think that’s a, in a way it’s almost hopefully. Empowering. The last thing I’d say, and I think, you know, this framework helps me, I always try to think about evolution. I try to think about, like, we’re animals. Like, what’s the kind of, you know, what are we made to do?
And I just think it’s instructive that Americans, excuse me, humans, particularly American humans, are the only animal, humans and animals we’ve domesticated and basically feed. Are the only animals with systematic rates of, of metabolic dysfunction, of, of depression, of, of diabetes, I, I, I don’t have this stat on me, but I would assume, um, one of the highest, if not the highest rate of just, just an order of magnitude more infertility, uh, fertility issues than a, than a lot of other animals, you know, a wolf or derivatives of dogs in the wild have close to a 0 percent obesity rate, close to, you know, very low cancer rate, a dog that, you know, we keep and have our habits and give, you know, crappy food.
Has a 50%, 50 percent of dogs get cancer. And it’s something like 40 percent actually have depression. That’s what’s happening to us. We’re the only animals that, that have these issues because we’ve deferred to the experts instead of our own innate kind of understanding, you know, not to go too far down the rabbit hole, but just having a young son, a one year old, which has just totally changed my life.
I mean, I think the medicalization of fertility of birth, I mean, there’s been some, some miracles. I mean, giving birth obviously was a very dangerous act and emergency medical procedures are vital. And, and it’s a huge distinction I want to drive here. Like, if there was an acute issue, an infection, uh, a complicated childbirth, you know, And it burst appendix that the the the system’s been a miracle for that for acute things that were going to kill us, but now 90 to 95 percent of costs are driven by chronic conditions and chronic conditions have only gone up And I just think we have bled into a lot of this miracle of birth and fertility and taken away Wonder and understanding about the power of our bodies and interconnectedness and just made it all kind of this sanitized You know, kind of, uh, you know, trust the science.
There’s a cure for everything. There’s a pill for everything. I think that’s kind of spiritually like not, not that, not that great personally. I having, you know, just gone through this process with my wife and, and, you know, I would have never expected to do a more of a natural birth. And, and, uh, she decided to do that.
We were kind of conservative folks growing up and trusted all the systems, but, um, but we, we really tried to askew my, my wife decided to skew a lot of the medical interventions and. And that was very gratifying and an incredible experience for us. Yeah. Well, and I think your message is empowering, Callie.
I mean, it’s like we have fallen into, I think, the trap of this either or scenario for everything. It’s, there’s no gray area. You know, you’re either with us or you’re against us. It’s ridiculous thinking. It’s, it’s not critical thinking. It’s not intelligence. It’s indoctrination. And I think giving women another perspective on how they can think critically about something as important as their fertility and give them an understanding of how the system works that I think if I’m, if I’m remembering correctly, if medical schools are funded 80 percent by pharma, like what does that tell you now?
It doesn’t mean that it has to skew. Evil, you know, but you have to understand if somebody’s paying the bills, they’re going to have influence and the scare tactics. And when you’ve seen that in the past three years, man, I mean, I, I don’t think we can get around that. Like if anything has done anything to destroy the credibility of, you know, the, the medical machine, it’s how they’ve handled the past three years and the scare tactics and, you know, getting people afraid of their own shadow, afraid of their relatives, afraid of.
Other people, like you’ve got to ask yourself. You know, what’s behind all that? And you don’t have to be a tinfoil hat wearing lunatic to ask some very basic, intelligent questions. Like what’s influencing this choice. What’s influencing this recommendation. Yeah. The, uh, uh, the healthcare industry is the, I think this is a key thing to understand when you’re making healthcare decisions, the healthcare industry is the largest, uh, industry in the United States.
Uh, it employs more people than any other industry, and it’s the fastest growing. Uh, because Which is crazy when you consider the number of people that are sick. It’s worse outcomes. So in any other industry, really, except maybe education, which is also problematic and our kids are, I think, just under threat.
But in most industries, innovation is, you know, lower cost, better outcomes. And yeah. Healthcare is the largest industry in the United States. It’s the fastest growing industry. It’s the most employed industry, but the more we spend, the worse outcomes get. And I think that is a result of incentives. I think that, you know, it’s, it’s this tough system because People at an individual level have plausible deniability and they are good people.
Like a doctor seeing one patient after the next that has metabolic dysfunction, trying to do whatever they can to help, you know, is helping that patient in that exact moment. A pharma researcher, you know, researching something is like, you know, doing research. A medical school dean feels good about themselves.
But like every single one of those people is profiting from more people getting sick for longer periods of time, and they’ll lose money if. People are metabolically healthy and exercising, eating healthy. So I would say there’s an increasing recognition of these folks that that’s the dynamic and there’s a lot of confliction, you know, doctors have the highest suicide rate and the highest burnout rate of any professional in the United States.
I don’t think that’s because they’re working a lot. A lot of professions actually work a lot. Entrepreneurs work a lot. If you, if you’re working a lot on something that you feel very motivated by, you don’t, you know, that’s okay. I think the problem in the medical system is that that we, we actually attract some of the smartest, most dedicated people in the world to come to America and be doctors.
You know, it’s kind of been the shining hill, you know, to be a doctor in the United States and there’s much easier ways to make money. So, so the folks that get into medicine, I think are. Very dedicated, but then they see like my sister did the same patients coming back again and again. They see the simple fact that patients are not getting better.
We’re getting sicker, fatter, more infertile, more depressed, and really an increasing rate. So I think that’s leading to a lot of, you know, just skyrocketing rates of depression and burnout among. Physicians and so it’s like a lot of people in the system are losing, but but but the medical system in itself, the invisible hand, it’s larger than any one person.
It’s incentivized to grow. So you know, there is no money being spent and no institutions. I mean, I’ll just give one example here. As I said, the USDA has a very conflicted folks that make our nutrition guidelines. Our nutrition guidelines to this day, right now, the guidelines we’re under say that 10 percent added sugar for a child two years and up in America is the recommendation.
10 grams, or 10 percent of the diet is added sugar or less. That is crazy. Like, this is a highly addictive drug that is wreaking metabolic dysfunction. And it’s like, I’ll tell you, if like, the Dean of Harvard Medical School, and the head of the NIH, and the Surgeon General, they could do this tomorrow. They could hold a press conference tomorrow, and say that 85 percent of healthcare costs, 8 of 10 deaths, leading causes of death in America, are being caused by chronic conditions, and the number one reason for that is the um, 100 X more sugar that we’re consuming than 100 years ago.
None of that’s even, I think, really debatable or they would disagree. So let’s push sugar recommendations to zero. Let’s not ban it, but let’s not recommend it as the government and try to get that out of our school schools and our, and that would, that would make a huge difference. Like, like, like, like we talk about solutions that would, that would dramatically decrease.
infertility. I mean, that would, that would dramatically, again, PCOS is highly related to insulin resistance, which is highly, which is, which is diabetes and the spectrum of diabetes, which is blood sugar. So, so I think there’s just this moral cowardice. Instead, you know, leaders from Harvard med school, now they have a huge new obesity clinic and they’re arguing literally that saying obesity isn’t the result of food or lifestyle.
They’re literally saying that Harvard medical school would stand to make a boatload of money, their leading obesity center in the country. If kids eat healthy, there’s no money for obesity centers. And the fact of that, you know, and I hate to say it, but it, but it’s somewhat, somewhat similar to what’s happened, you know, the massive just boom Fertility and, you know, again, they’re doing, these folks are doing good things on a patient by patient basis, but I find it a little grotesque is that it’s some kind of like, you know, some kind of victory for children’s health, that we have massive children’s hospitals, that some victory for women’s health, that we have just massive increase in spending and massive structures for fertility, that it’s an increase in.
You know victories for heart disease that we have massive childhood cardiology centers and liver transplant centers It’s like this is all like heralded at press gatherings with politicians about how it’s like medical innovation This is terrible. Like like we should not be trying to build larger and larger fertility centers That’s not a victory for women’s health.
It’s a disaster that everyone’s getting so infertile. We should be asking that question, but we’re being gaslighted, gaslighted such a degree that even a patient today thinks it’s kind of fringe to talk about nutrition. That is, that is inconstable. Right. Well, I mean, I think your, your point is absolutely well taken.
And, and I think your point about. The right doctors doing good things. I mean, there’s a handful of physicians, you know, that I’ve come across in my own practice, been on this podcast that are daring to do things differently, encouraging women to be more mindful, look at their mindset, look at their diet, look at their exercise, look at their quality of life.
Like how that’s cutting edge, Callie. I mean, that, and, and the idea that Yeah. You know, I remember when I was going through fertility treatment. I mean, there was no attention paid to lifestyle. Nobody was asking me anything about my diet. It was just totally pinned on my age that I must be old. I’m over 35.
That is the only reasonable explanation. But then you have to ask again, where. Did those studies come from? Where is that information coming from? And why would they be incentivized to have me empower myself and other women? I mean, if, if all these women just took out, as you said, seed oils, highly processed grains and sugar, like what impact could that have on their metabolic health?
It’s probably extraordinary. Astounding. And if you Google PCOS, you know, food, PubMed, you know, there’s, there’s really astounding research. It gets a 12 week intervention on really trying to cut grains and sugar. I mean, kind of almost like a keto type diet. I mean, there, there’s really powerful, I mean, this, this is not, you know, just again, it’s like, it’s like you talk to a provider about food.
It’s all, I guess, you know, preventative, the community health group, but no, it’s, it’s the best reversal. It’s the best. It’s the best treatment. It just, it just makes me sad because it’s like people say like lifestyle interventions hard. No, I, I think, I think, you know, there’s various numbers on this, but some put it at 25 percent of, you know, PCOS rates that plummeting sperm count rates, massively increasing depression and, and, and suicide rates.
I mean, you know, what’s happening right now is really hard and, and I actually think people want to be healthy, but we’re in this system that just totally gaslights and incentivizes kind of the wrong. I mean, you know, we spend 4 trillion in health care, you know, we would never design from a blank slate the policy we have right now where we wait for everyone to get infertile and sick and, and overweight and depressed and then give them these marginal pills.
We’d really try to attack the root cause and, you know, we could do that. We could, you know, subsidize, which my company’s trying to do healthier food, you know, a lot of policy instruments to, to encourage a more, uh, active, less sedentary lifestyle. So there’s a lot of, a lot of elements that we can do. You know, I, I think, I think that’s happening.
I think math is just going to demand it. Cause I really do think we’re either going to become like that’s the scene in Wally with everyone just kind of blobs. Just, I mean, I mean, I’m not trying to be too hyperbolic, but we are, we are becoming like, I mean, we are becoming increasingly infertile, overweight, 80 percent of the country.
And this has been a big journey for me. It’s like, it’s not like a, like I got on this. Cause I’m, I had health struggle. We all, we all are, but just like, we should all be, it’s not a judgment. It’s actually like, like we’re being played here. Right. Yeah, and, and, and just my personal journey has been with my mom and just having a new son.
And, um, and, and, and I’m scared for the world kids are going into. I mean, like, like they’re getting. I mean, if you think about the leverage points on like a child’s happiness, it’s like eating well being like moving, it’s just going to impact almost everything. You mentioned, you know, your advice and this radical advice to like eat better and, you know, move and think about metabolic habits with fertility.
It’s just like, we should be encouraging as a society is the number one goal, everyone to have that journey and explore that curiosity, but we’re doing the exact opposite. I mean, You know, just, just one small example. And I know, you know, this is a little bit of a controversial figure, but like, you know, Dr.
Fauci and, and, and everyone in the medical establishment was, was criticizing podcast hosts like Joe Rogan and, you know, 2020, 2021 for literally like they were saying every day, like to exercise. It wasn’t about like weird. It was like, it was like this message from kind of the podcast world and the, and the kind of health, you know, influencer book world.
It was like, Hey, isn’t, isn’t COVID tied to In metabolic dysfunction, you look at the statistics on, you know, blood sugar, obesity, and death. It was astounding. You look at the statistics around like vitamin D and just, just micronutrients and nutrition. It’s astounding. That was called misinformation. There was a absolute, like, like almost violent attacks on people who were talking about the links between metabolic dysfunction and COVID, which were astounding.
I mean, there’s a recent study that came out about vitamin D. just like highly correlated if you just took vitamin D supplements about more death rates from COVID. Yeah. I mean, look at, look at poor Ryan Cole, totally crucified. I was living in Idaho at the time and he was out there telling everyone get sunshine, take a vitamin D supplement, but he was crucified like some kind of a nut.
And it’s just. Again, I, I, I, I’m trying to explain this as, as simply as I can, but like, it’s like it would have, this would have seemed like such a hippie thing to say to me, like, you know, several years ago, this has been a huge journey for me, but it’s just like the importance of getting sunlight, the importance of like putting natural food in our bodies, like the importance of drinking clean water, like these, like we’re just animals.
Like if you put any animal. Into a small box with limited sunlight and processed food, you know, dysregulated sleep, and unnatural light all the time. That animal would completely break down and go crazy. Like, that’s what we’re systematically doing. Again, I’m not trying to go back to the Stone Age here and, you know, um, but like, but like, we should just like, Understand that like there’s been, I mean, we’ve, we’ve created amazing innovations, you know, the past couple hundred years, but like our biological needs for ourselves are just totally, I mean, Until a couple hundred years ago, like there was no, there was really not light like, like unnatural artificial light, like, like when the, when the sun went down, we might’ve had like a, but, but we, we were like, we were going to sleep.
Like we evolved, we evolved that way for millions of years. Like, like, like, like that’s how our cells evolve. Like we are on a 24 hour clock because of the sun. Like the sun is very. Important like we are who we are because of the Sun It’s just like just just just hand waving away these like biological needs and saying that’s like fringe When we’re thinking about something that’s so core to our evolution like like infertility, which is totally out of whack It’s like that.
Just it’s just not correct. Yeah. Yeah. And, and the most recent, I mean, it depends on where you look, but one of the most recent statistics that I looked at is it used to be one in eight couples struggle with fertility. Now it’s one in six. That is a dramatic jump in. Yeah. And it’s If people are not asking questions, then it’s kind of on you, man.
You know, it’s, it’s like you, it’s gotta start asking some questions. You have to start looking at, you know, our, how we can empower ourselves in the process. I mean, I just had a, I just saw a functional medicine physician and he was telling me, he’s like, yeah, In the Houston area where we live, he said he can time it to almost the day that somebody from outside of the United States comes into the United States, has six months of eating American food, and they will suddenly develop, and he’s watched this over the years in his practice, IBS, gluten intolerance, all kinds of rashes, things like that.
He said six months to the day. He knows when, when people come from, from out of the country, they notice this. Yeah. And it’s something helpful for me is, you know, a lot of these issues are, you know, we hear the word inflammation and, you know, we all kind of, I’ve heard that and we’ve all heard that word.
It’s been instructing me what, what actually that means. So inflammation. is generally throughout our history. Evolutionary history is a good thing. Like inflammation is when there’s some foreign item in the body and our body basically miraculously like summons forces to attack it basically. And now we’re chronically inflamed and that’s, you know, what leads to the rat.
It’s kind of an underpinning this, this chronic inflammation. A lot of that’s because we have, as I talked about, those, the foundation of our diet is foreign substances. Our body is chronically inflamed because we have chronically put, in America particularly, foreign substances in our body. I mean, there are thousands of chemicals and pesticides and things like that that are allowed in the United States that aren’t in Europe.
You know, I’m a free market guy, I’m a libertarian, but that’s not a free market, that’s a rigged system. Right. It’s a rigged system that we subsidize this poison and monocropping and, you know, corn, which turns into high fructose corn syrup, which goes into our kids food, which is totally weaponized and grains.
We subsidize that. And then we have just a totally bought off, you know, regulatory apparatus where we have thousands of neurotoxins that are actually available to put in the foods and, you know, we’ve, we’ve let just wholly blind eye to our, our farming practices, which are totally unstable. Our soil is just dying.
It’s just like. This is not a free market. It’s a rig system. And it’s just, there’s just so much more respect for food. I mean, I don’t really like to give Europe a lot of credit, but like, you know, European countries and some of them, I believe France spend two times more per cap GDP percentage on food than we do.
We, we, we, I think among developed countries, we’re the lowest percentage of our income that we spend on food. And that, that’s a disaster. It’s a total disaster. Because of course we, we, we make up for that. And then some with our healthcare costs. And it’s just, we’ve just lost again, I take it to a spurge. I think you said something beautiful, which is just like, it’s so simple, but it’s just like, you know, on the fertility journey, like really trying to like, I’ll just give my personal, you know, big motivation for me is just like having a son.
Like I haven’t always had the healthiest habits and it’s just like having a kid. It’s just like, it’s been so rewarding to like be reading books, to listening to podcasts like yours on all these different areas to try to think about the food I want him to eat. It’s just like, I don’t know. A lot of your listeners are on that journey or like that millions of people are waking up.
I’m, I’m part of that army, but it’s just like, this is. This is like a key I think to happiness actually to like, you know, understand, you know, the interconnectedness of your body. I mean, you know, even my mom who, who got a metabolic condition from her prediabetes and passed away. I mean, the fact that she in her final years was really understanding what prediabetes was, reading a lot of books, working with my sister on fasting, things like that, that had a huge impact on me.
Like that legacy still lives on. It’s just like we have been taken away from our body. And I think again, there’s just nothing more profound. And more instructive of how we’ve lost our way than what’s happening fertility and we should not be, you know, looking at one of these core evolutionary functions, the greatest miracle that a human of, you know, any, either gender can do is produce life.
And there’s something profoundly like wrong happening, like, like, like unprecedented happening. Like, I just can’t believe, actually, when you step back, why this isn’t a national emergency. Like, like, truly, like, our, you know, and it’s not our fault. It’s a really, like, our bodies are trying to tell us something.
And the answer is not that we have a deficiency of, of certain drugs or procedures. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I really appreciate your time today, Callie, because this is an awakening. It’s, I think there’s an awakening happening across the board and, you know, my area of it is fertility and I see more and more women starting to ask better questions and, you know, looking for real partnership.
With their practitioners, because we’re not enemies. It’s just, Hey, there’s, there’s more than a few ways to get to where you want to go. And it’s not, you know, shortly before we jumped on, I was recording a podcast with one of my clients who got pregnant naturally at 45. Despite the medical field telling her that she had a less than 5 percent chance of doing so.
But when she started addressing her metabolic issues, when she started having more joy in her life, sleeping more, sleep was a huge thing, as you were saying too. You know, right when she shouldn’t have had a baby, you know, gotten pregnant naturally at 45, she’ll be giving birth on her 46th birthday. Like it’s just, it’s crazy.
So I really appreciate the work that you’re doing. And if you wouldn’t mind before we go, just share a little bit about the work that your company does and, and how women can get in contact with you and how all that works. Thank you. You know, it was really kind of radicalized on this thesis through the personal experiences I mentioned.
And then in 2021, as I was selling my previous company, which was in e commerce, got into this space really more heavily by helping my sister, who’s really been, um, been, been on big spokesperson for metabolic health and on this, helping her write a book. So, so got my head around and that, that that’s going to be released next year about metabolic health and tying it to a lot of these issues and fertility as well.
As I’m writing that book, I’m like, how do we actually change incentives? How do we actually, because the problem is, is that. If you’re a woman facing infertility, you’re really being incentivized, you know, the, the, the, the prescriptions are paid for potentially the procedures, you know, the whole incentive of, of the system.
And then you have this really kind of fear based thing where your doctor is highly incentivized to push you in this interventionist route is like saying, you know, you’re almost risking your fertility if you don’t go this route to really, really kind of bad incentives. And I think that exists for a lot of conditions.
How do we change that? So what our company does is HSA FSA funds. There’s 140 billion in these funds. Most Americans have access to them. I never used them there. So for confusing for some people, but their tax advantage money, you can elect an open enrollment, 7, 200 for family. And it’s for qualified medical expenses, which I always thought was drugs.
And it’s basically designed by pharma companies for that money to go to drugs, you know, when you’re sick. And that’s why a lot of people don’t use them. We found, though, that if a doctor writes a note explaining how food, exercise, supplements can actually help prevent or reverse a condition, and PCOS is a big one that we work on, then we we provide that note.
And then you can purchase healthy food in that note, exercise supplements. I mean, there’s, you know, Omega 3s and some other very important ones for, for, for, for fertility and, and general in that world. But our physicians, our clinicians create a detailed plan based on the condition. Um, and then, and then that saves 30, 40%.
So we have a very, hopefully seamless. Telehealth process and then integrated with leading merchants, uh, where you can just asynchronously take a survey and purchase items with your HSA FSA. So it’s true med. com. We’re, we’re launching very soon with, with, with some great brands and. We just want to be that place to, to steer money towards these root cause items, these items that really promote health, not, and, and maybe not having to wait until you’re really sick and, and any drugs.
So that’s the goal of our company, true mad. com. And then, uh, I’ve been talking a lot about this. I’ve just been so much gratitude to be communicating about these issues. I really see our company as an advocacy organization. So on Instagram and Twitter, I’m at Cali mean C A L L E Y M E A N S. And just trying to call out the broken incentives of the, of the system, which, you know, is, is the mission of our company and what I’m writing this book about.
That’s awesome, Callie. And we’ll make sure to link all of your social and your website in the show notes. But you know, dude, keep up the good fight. I mean, I think that what you’re really inviting people to do is certainly empower themselves, think critically. And give themselves a chance to find their way back to health.
I mean, it’s, you know, I really wish your company extraordinary success. And then the book as well, because I think you’re touching so many lives. So thank you so much, Callie. Thank you, Roseanne, for all you do and, and devoting your life to this, this mission. And I’m happy to be in the fight with you. Yes.
Loves, wasn’t that just a fascinating conversation with Callie Means? I really hope that that sparked some thoughts in your own mind about your own advocacy, about looking at ways that you can empower yourself. You can start changing up some behaviors that may be feeling a little disempowered, whether it comes to your health, whether it comes to what you’re eating, whether it comes to what you’re fucking consuming.
All of this comes together. Remember. You are the common denominator on this journey, the way you think, what you believe, what you consume, what you take into your body, what you’re listening to. All of this factors in. We are whole beings. We’re not just a pile of organs, okay? You are a complete person. And deserve to have the best of everything as you move through this chapter in your life.
And look, check out trumed.com. I know that Callie and his team are working super hard on getting that out and the book and all this good stuff that they have coming out in the world. So check out calliemeans.com, trumed.com. It’s super exciting shit. And look, if you know for yourself on this journey, mindset is the next thing on your list.
Maybe you’ve got. Your treatment team nailed. You’ve got your diet nailed, but you’re like, you know what? I really do need to start thinking like a mama bear on fire. I need to be fearless on this journey. My fearlessly fertile method program is for women who intend to get pregnant in the next 12 months in the next 12 months, ladies, and who say a giant hell yes, to covering their bases, mind and body mind and body.
So you don’t have to look back on this time in your life with regret. I work with women who are committed to success. So to apply for your interview for this signature program, go to my website, www.FromMaybeToBaby.com and apply for an interview there. My methodologies help women around the world make their mom dreams come true.
We got the receipts, baby. And if you don’t have a mindset for success, then sure baby, you’ve got a gaping hole in your strategy. Let’s fix that shit and set you up for success. Till next time. Change your mindset. Change your results. Love this episode of the Fearlessly Fertile podcast? Subscribe now and leave an awesome review.
Remember, the desire in your heart to be a mom is there because it was meant for you. When it comes to your dreams, keep saying hell yes.