How the People Who Sold You Cigarettes Started Feeding Your Kids

How a text message, one long interview, and a year of loss changed the way I see American health today — and what I’m asking you to do about it.

I was building a website in a café in Dutch Kills — a quiet pocket of Queens, New York — on a late August afternoon in 2024 when the text came in. It was from a close friend, the kind whose recommendations I don’t ignore. You need to check this out. She’d sent a link from X to the latest Tucker Carlson interview, and when I clicked on the link the post caught my eye:

Two and a half hours long. I almost saved it for later, but I didn’t – playing it in the background as I worked. Once it got past the introductory pleasantries of the first few moments, it had me— not because it confirmed a political side, but because it started identifying dots that had long been unconsciously gnawing at me, separately, for years. A health epidemic that keeps getting worse. A medical system that increasingly treats symptoms and almost never asks about root causes. Money that flows toward managing disease and away from curing it. I had suspected all of it. I had never heard anyone lay it out, in order, with the receipts.

Two facts that broke it open

That first pass, I got interrupted — work, phone calls, the ordinary noise of a working afternoon. So later that night I listened again, this time paying close attention, start to finish. Two things landed like a punch.

The first: in the late 1980s and into the 1990s, major tobacco companies bought major food companies. I had never known this. The very corporations that spent decades engineering cigarettes to be addictive — then burying the science that said so — took that same money, those same scientists, and that same lobbying machine, and moved into what America eats. This was news to me, and once I saw it I couldn’t unsee it.

The second: children are reaching puberty younger and younger — some as young as seven or eight years old. That one genuinely rattled me. It sounded almost too extreme to be true, the kind of claim that makes you stare off into space as if contemplating the end of the universe. So I did what I would strongly encourage anyone to do with anything in this series, including the words you’re reading right now. I went and checked.

What I found was worse than what they said.

What I found when I checked

I didn’t want to take a podcast’s word for it, however compelling. So, I went to the independent research — peer-reviewed studies, national statistics, foundations with no stake in selling me food or drugs. Here is some of what is not in dispute.

We are dying younger than we should. An independent team of researchers — not a government press office — has spent years counting what they call the “Missing Americans”: the people who die each year who would still be alive if the United States simply matched the death rates of other wealthy nations. In a normal recent year, that number runs past 700,000. At the pandemic’s peak it approached 1.1 million in a single year. About half of all American deaths under the age of 65 would not happen if we merely kept pace with our peers.

Excess U.S. deaths versus peer nations.

We pay more than anyone on earth for the privilege of these worse outcomes. The independent Commonwealth Fund compared ten wealthy countries across dozens of measures in 2024. The United States came in dead last overall — while spending, by far, the most. Their report title doesn’t mince words: “A Portrait of the Failing U.S. Health System.” When a country spends the most and dies the youngest, that is not a resource problem. It is an incentive problem.

Each dot is a wealthy nation. The U.S. sits alone: most spending, shortest life.

And the diseases are arriving earlier. Cancer, long thought of as a disease of the old, is climbing among the young — and among young women most of all, who now face far higher rates than young men, a gap that has widened sharply since 2002. The most credible independent explanation keeps pointing back to the same place the Means siblings did: a food supply rebuilt around ultra-processed products. A 2024 review in The BMJ, pooling data on nearly ten million people, tied ultra-processed food to 32 distinct harms, including early death. The more you eat, the higher the risk climbs — the step-by-step pattern that is the fingerprint of cause, not coincidence.

As for the claim that seemed ridiculous — children maturing years earlier than their great-grandparents did — it checks out. The average age of puberty has fallen decade over decade, and researchers increasingly point to the

same suspects: what we eat, and the industrial chemicals that have saturated our food, water, soil, and air. The Means siblings weren’t exaggerating. If anything, they were being polite.

The oldest playbook in America

Here is the part that turned my shock into something closer to anger. None of this is an accident, and none of it is even new. It is the tobacco playbook, run a second time on a bigger target.

When cigarette makers faced the Surgeon General and the courts, they didn’t vanish. They bought the food companies, and they brought two things with them: the science of engineering a product to override your body’s natural “stop” signal, and the machinery of manufacturing doubt — funding friendly research, forming front groups, and lobbying against honest labels and regulation. We now have independent measurements of how well that machinery still works. Studies of sugary drinks funded by the industry were found to be roughly five times more likely to report no link to harm than independent studies. That is not science. That is a purchased conclusion — and it is exactly the kind of “expert” data I would later watch get held up as the gold standard.

Over the years, that same money flowed upward — into the dietary guidelines that told us what to eat, into the agencies meant to referee the industry, and outward into the media that was supposed to warn us. When the referee is paid by one team, the game is fixed. That is the story this series will trace, step by step, in the articles to come.

Industry-funded sugary-drink reviews were 5× more likely to find ‘no harm.’

Why this landed the way it did

I didn’t come to this as a stranger. In the years after COVID, I had the wonderful privilege of working alongside some genuinely brilliant and courageous people here in New York — Cara Castronuova of LindellTV, Michael Kane of Teachers for Choice, John Gilmore of the Autism Action Network, Leland Lehrman, Cathleen “Cat” McGuire, and so many others — through Defeat the Mandates and the growing movement that has become known as MAHA. I had already watched trusted institutions behave in ways that didn’t match their promises. So when the Means siblings described capture and corruption in food and medicine, it didn’t sound like a conspiracy to me. It sounded like a pattern I already recognized, finally named.

Then it stopped being abstract.

Over the last year, I watched several friends get diagnosed, treated, and die of cancer. Two of them within the last thirty days alone. I want to be careful and honest here: I can’t tell you the precise cause of any one person’s illness, and I won’t pretend to. But when you have sat with that much loss in such a short period of time, and you are holding a stack of independent data showing cancer rising and lifespans falling in the richest country on earth, the statistics stop being numbers. They become names.

It changed how I live. I became far more conscious of what I eat; I changed my diet; I began drinking out of glass containers instead of plastic bottles and cups; I even did a five-day, water-only fast for the first time in my life. But more than it changing my habits, it hardened my resolve. Because what I kept arriving at was not sadness. It was this: a destructive level of capture, corruption, and greed had been weaponized against trusting and vulnerable Americans — and most of us were never told nor warned.

A different kind of ending

I could end here, in that anger. Plenty of writings do. But anger with nowhere to go curdles, and it feeds the very system that thrives on widespread division and misinformation. So this series is going to end somewhere else — not in a fight, but in a garden.

There is an old line, often credited to Buckminster Fuller, that has become something like a compass for me, and has become the mantra of The Stewardship Party:

We are not going to out-lobby the people who invented lobbying. We are not going to win by screaming at a machine that runs on our

attention. But there is one thing that cannot be captured, cannot be bought, and cannot be starved into submission: a family, and then a neighborhood, and then a town, that learns to grow its own food and take back its own health. That is the simple, almost absurdly ordinary solution at the heart of everything I’m going to write — the work being organized at StewardshipParty.org, household by household, food forest by food forest, community by community.

We’ll get there. But that’s the destination, and this is only the first step.

Before you read another word

This is the first article in a series I’ll be publishing over the coming weeks. Together we’ll go deeper into the things Casey and Calley Means laid out so remarkably well — how the tobacco playbook came to your kitchen, how the referees got captured, what it’s costing us in lives and dollars, and, most importantly, the better way that is already growing in communities across the country as you read this article.

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The Purpose of this Journey

The purpose of this journey is not merely just to educate. It is to introduce one of the simplest, most achievable solutions in response to the corruption happening all around us — in every community throughout America. Return the power in this nation away from corrupt organizations, captured agencies, and a government that no longer represents WE THE PEOPLE.  Time for us to be accountable together, rather than simply seeking accountability where it has become impossible to find. Let it start with me, with you. Be the change you wish to see in the World!

Grow Food. Free People. Change the WORLD. 

Visit www.StewardshipParty.org today to learn more.

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NEXT IN THE SERIES
Part Two — “The Cigarette Playbook Came to Your Kitchen.” How the tobacco giants bought our food, bringing their science and their lobbyists with them.