LIVE: MAHA Action Discusses Media Coverage, Chronic Disease, and Health Policy

It still seems like a dream. When integrity was paramount. I cannot contend that I have always been right or wise. And trusted voices guided a nation. How do you measure such an astonishing moment? Today, the headlines are blurred. The signal lost in the noise of corporate agendas and paid narratives. Vocal anti-vaxxer. Deranged lies. It is humiliating. What happened to the truth? It hasn't disappeared. It simply moved. The Maha Report brings you unfiltered, independent journalism covering the issues of the Make America Healthy Again movement. Rediscover the facts and reclaim the truth. Subscribe now at themahareport.com. Welcome to the Maha Media Hub, and welcome to the Maha Revolution. I'm Tony Lyons, president of Maha Action. So a couple of days ago, I asked a Politico reporter why they chose to investigate the organization Maha that is trying to stop corporations from poisoning the American public instead of investigating those companies. And she said, I don't know. Well, I think I know. Politico has a conflict of interest. It's one of Washington's main sources on health, food, chemical, and drug policy, and it sells those same companies privileged access to the policymakers who read it. This isn't ordinary advertising. Politico's branded content has been described as a way for advertisers to reach the Washington elite in order to shift policy. So the industries that Politico covers pay for sponsored content for events that put their people in the room with lawmakers and for Agency IQ, a Politico division that helps drug and food companies track and engage the regulators Politico writes about. So look at who's paying. Pharma is an organization. It's a drug lobby group. And that has sponsored Politico's health newsletter, Pulse. The American Chemistry Council paid for their comments on an issue called America's Economy Runs on Chemistry, where its CEO complained about the enormous regulatory burden on the chemical businesses. Gilead scientists sponsored Investing in America's Future, published as a 2026 policy agenda, took shape in Washington. And Danone, a giant of ultra-processed food, paid Politico to tell readers that Americans are rightfully looking at food as a critical part of the solution for many health challenges. And right now, Pulse is sponsored by the Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease. Sounds great. Sounds like a Maha Ally, a Maha Ally, but it clearly isn't. Pharma helped launch it. It shared Pharma's ad... Thank you, Brad. location and employees for nine years, and it listed many of the people there as key officials on its tax forms. So when the Maha Commission released its childhood chronic disease report, this group pushed back on its scrutiny of prescription drugs, vaccine, and mental health treatment. So let's look at the headlines that Politico chooses. Here are some of them. Maha gets frustrated with Kennedy. The groups backing RFK Jr. are running low on cash. RFK Jr.'s movement is in total disarray. RFK Jr.'s alliance with Trump is on tenterhooks. And just days ago, the short, unhappy marriage of Maha and the GOP. The story is always the same. Maha is divided, broke, failing, or just, you know, totally through. That isn't the scrutiny of an organization that is researching things. It's a campaign to convince you that the movement challenging the companies that they represent and saying that they've already lost. So as I said the day after the midterms, when Politico was part of the absolute pile on, the reports of Maha's death are just wishful thinking by all those who want to continue poisoning the American public for profit. So to make it clear, we're not going anywhere. But there's another fact that belongs in this whole picture. Politico is owned by a German company, Axel Springer, which is controlled by two German billionaires who have seven billion dollars between them, Frieda Springer and Matthias Döpfner. And some of the clients paying Politico to reach policymakers are German companies, too. So the clearest example of that is Bayer, the German drug and crop science giant that bought Monsanto and makes Roundup and Glyphosate. Politico ran a multi-year campaign for Bayer called Drive Sustainable Progress. In 2024, it was designed to reach, in their words, changing governments and elected policymakers with Bayer's priorities as they prepared their 2025 plans. A Politico event even opened with remarks from a senior person at Bayer. So here's the double standard. Atrazine, still widely used on farms in this country, was banned in Germany in 1991 and across the EU in 2004. Glyphosate, the chemical in Roundup, is restricted in Germany. It's largely banned in private gardens, parks, playgrounds, schoolgrounds, and pre-harvest spraying is strictly banned. Here, it's the most commonly used herbicide in the country. So a German company is helping other German companies poison Americans with products that are highly regulated or banned in Germany. Think about that. And these companies want more than just access. They want total immunity in this country. Bayer pushed Congress for the Farm Bill language that MAHA and a bipartisan group of lawmakers called a liability shield for glyphosate. In April, after a MAHA uprising, the House finally stripped it out. But two months later, Bayer got much of what it wanted from the Supreme Court. A St. Louis jury had awarded John Durnell $1.25 million, finding Roundup's label should have warned him about cancer. But in June, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that federal pesticide law preempts his failure to warn claim. Justice Jackson, joined by Justice Gorsuch, warned that the ruling unjustifiably closes the courthouse doors to state tort plaintiffs like Durnell. That's a liability shield by another name. And vaccine makers already have theirs, you know, in the form of the 1986 Act. So we're on the other side of every one of these fights. And as I've said many times, if a vaccine, pesticide or chemical company has to pay for the harm they cause, which they should, they're going to make safer products. So no product of any kind should be granted liability protection by our government. Lawmakers are put in power to protect us, not big corporations. So all of this makes Maha a fierce competitor for the things that Politico sells. And if we succeed, the companies that pay Politico for access will stop paying them. So a German-owned publication takes money from German chemical and drug companies. You know, it has a straightforward commercial interest in seeing us fail. Politico's editorial standards say we're fair, objective, and nonpartisan. That's a quote. And they promise to avoid conflicts of interest, real and perceived. And then here's another quote from them. A sponsored content or discussion label doesn't make that conflict go away. And that's just a fact. Readers deserve to know who's paying before they treat Politico's obituaries for this movement as news. So here are a couple of other facts. The U.S. government paid $8.5 million in 2025 in Politico content to thousands of government employees. And the companies like Bayer and BASF paid millions to have access through Politico to those same government employees and regulators. So Politico was paid by the U.S. government to deliver information to officials to influence their policy decisions. And, you know, Politico made millions, the companies they represent made millions, and the American public consumed more toxic products. So as a result, chronic disease goes up, and then CMS pays more to treat that chronic disease. So it's great for Politico, great for the companies, not so much for American children. On today's show, we're going to have incredible people who've been at the front line of fighting this kind of corruption in mainstream media. We'll be joined by Del Bigtree, Jeffrey Tucker, and Eric Berg. But first, we're going to hear from Cheryl Atkinson, and she's an award-winning investigative journalist, you know, one of the last investigative journalists in this country, a five-time Emmy Award winner, and a recipient of the prestigious Edward R. Murrow Prize. After more than two decades working for CBS, CNN, and PBS, she now hosts Full Measure with Cheryl Atkinson. She's also a New York Times bestselling author and has consistently pursued the stories that others are reluctant or fearful to tell. Welcome, Cheryl. It's a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you for having me, Tony. I think you've really put your finger on this huge problem and explained it in a way The public is starting to understand, particularly in the post-COVID environment, more than ever before. Go ahead. Yeah. So, you know, you've said in the past that at some point we had a real shift in this country from reporting to narrative shaping. So why don't you sort of describe when you first saw that and how you think that all works? I think there's always been an element of that in the media, but it wasn't impacting me on a daily basis until I began covering the untouchable subjects assigned by CBS News to look into pharmaceutical products and vaccine safety. And at the time, we're talking early 2000s, everybody was doing that. New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, ABC. And we were unearthing some incredible information about risks and misleading information and corruption inside the industry and government. But then, in, I would say, five or so years of covering that and Congress holding hearings, which they'll never do today, honest hearings on these issues, the industry figured out how to get its nose under the tent in newsrooms through advertising and through editorial placement of people in a way that would stop the coverage. And they effectively did so. I see it better in hindsight when looking back than I did when I was in the moment. But in the moment, the company, CBS, went from encouraging and assigning me to covering these stories. And considering them some of the most important things we could do, considering how many people are on prescription medicine and how many people take vaccines, they went from that to feeling I felt attention and it pushed me pull you from places at the corporation that I really couldn't identify who didn't want some of these stories on and who started trying to shape them and move them. And then just tried to discredit me and attack me personally. That's one of the things they do when you see. So somebody going after the personal angle or a person on something versus the issue, you should suspect that there is a propaganda effort behind it. And in this case, that's exactly what happened. When I see what they're doing or trying to do to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The way to decode that, again, I think people are learning this, is to understand that they are propagandists, and that means they consider Robert F. Kennedy Jr. highly effective and a huge threat to the things that they want to protect. So in a way, it's a backhanded compliment, although it's not pleasant. And I think we should just keep pointing that out. I also have a problem with the notion that Politico and so many other media organizations, as you rightly say, that are conflicted and funded by industry and special interests, They're treated by others in the media and amplified as if they're a news organization. You know, people talk about the news agencies will say Politico says this. Politico reports that as if there's some credibility behind it rather than explaining or at least noting what Politico's conflicts of interest are and how wrong they've been about so many things. So that's been an issue endemic within the media, too. Yeah, I mean, you know, Bobby Kennedy tells this story of that, that he was at a restaurant once. And he ran into the head of, you know, one of the big TV news shows. And he asked the guy, you know, why don't you ever cover big pharma corruption or, you know, really investigate some of their practices? And the guy said, oh, Bobby, you know, I'm really sorry, but, you know, almost all of our advertising comes from those companies. And we would just be out of business if we started doing that. And that's probably 30 years back. So this has been going on for a very, very long time. And then watching Bobby on CNN with Dana Bash, where she says there are 200 studies that prove that the kinds of things you've been saying aren't true. And then, you know, you would you would wonder, you know, she's she's she's really going after Bobby. And but but that's her her big line. You know, there are these 200 studies. But then, you know, viewers should ask, but they're just not trained to really ask, you know, if there really are 200 studies, why not just post them on CNN dot com? I mean, that isn't hard to do. So, you know, this is not, you know, real news. They're not looking for real science. But, you know, so so what do you think we can do? To sort of counter the fact that, you know, big food, big pharma, big ag money is just controlling all of the news. I mean, what is the answer? How do we get past that? It's not only controlling the news, but as you know, it largely controls the nonprofit universe, such as cancer-causing chemical industries, funding the American Cancer Society, which will then make public policy statements as if these things can't or don't cause cancer or will deflect from the science that shows that they do. I mean, it's really been a wholesale takeover of our information landscape. And my approach has been always just to Call it out constantly. When I report on something, I point out when a conflicted interest makes a statement or puts out a supposed news article, I point out who they are and that they're propagandists or funded by an industry by industry. And too often, the media doesn't do that basic job because they're kind of in on it. But if you just keep reporting, Dr. Paul Offit, who's a propagandist for the vaccine industry, but was long held out at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia as if he were an independent vaccine expert. I think my reporting every time I spoke to him when I discovered this, I think I was the first one to constantly call him a vaccine inventor and to acknowledge his conflict of interest and not treat him like an independent safety expert. And lo and behold, for a time period, a lot of other media, I guess, was embarrassed into at least acknowledging his proprietary role in the vaccine industry, which they had not done previously. So I think just continuing to call it out and help people become. I'm even more savvy at recognizing to look at the opposite. When these interests or coordinated interests are attacking the same person, using the same language frequently, always taking the same issue and being very one-sided, you should consider that possibly the other side is true and that there are well-funded interests behind getting this message out in a concerted way. Sure. If they're taking the time to attack somebody, maybe that means that they've struck a nerve that Bobby has or that you have or that Maha has. So you've done a spectacular job and I'm grateful for all the work that you've done. And thanks for coming on. We're going to do a whole series of these kinds of shows in the coming months, really to just push back and to just try Let's try to get out as broadly as possible. The real stories, rather than be defensive, kind of just make sure that the world learns how this whole system works. So hope to have you on many, many times. That's great. Thanks, Tony. Next up, we have Jeffrey Tucker, and he's the founder and president of the Brownstone organization. And he has, you know. He came to the forefront during the COVID-19 era, and his platform was critical of lockdowns and the government during that time period. And he's just done a spectacular job. He's written 17 books. He's one of the most prominent voices really fighting for liberty and shaping the debate on freedom in all its different forms. So welcome, Jeffrey. Great to have you on. Thanks so much, and thank you for going after Politico. I've had my own dealings with them, and I consider them not a real news source. It's a ridiculous venue. Tangling with them has been enormously frustrating. They have no public reach whatsoever. No regular person even knows or has ever heard about them. Most of their reach is within centers of power, whether it's industry or Washington, and that's their ticket. That's what they serve. That's their whole purpose. Yeah. So what is what is your sense of of this whole sort of, you know, smear camp campaigns, fact checking, all of these different kinds of, you know, of of methods to discredit people when it's it's very clear who they should be looking into, who they should be going after? You know, big pharma companies have gotten so many criminal fines, Well, sure, but almost every day I run across some explosive story that should be covered by Politico or Stat News or MedPage Today or the Washington Post and New York Times. You can go through the list. The last couple of days, just for example, the reporting system called VAERS has been flooded with injury reports from the new Moderna mRNA shot that is available down at your local Walgreens and CVS. They're being flooded. Now, you think this would be like a national scandal, and it should be, but it's not going to be so long as the media doesn't report it, and the media will not report this. These are shots that are right now verifiably injuring people, very similar to the COVID shots, and there's no talk about it. But I could go through the whole list. I wrote an article the other day on the so-called VSD system, which is called the Vaccine Safety Data Link System, which turns out to be a controlled system by basically one guy, Eric Weintraub at the CDC, whose name is on all the papers by VSD, but no researcher or scientist at any university has access to that in the last 20 years. So you'd think that would be a scandal, but no, nobody will cover it. The fact that the organization called Informed Consent Action Network worked for four years to get all the text fields and checkboxes from a system called V-safe, which was set up especially to monitor the COVID vaccines. They had to get a court order to get CDC to cough them up. And as a result, we have millions and millions of pages. We put them out in books called Cries for Help. It's a scandal for the ages. And as far as I know, and again, this is all public and verifiable information that citizens themselves reported to the systems. The news media has not covered this at all. Or look at the Fauci diaries. Four years, Senator Rand Paul's office, not four years, really two years, found all the diaries. You'd think this would be explosive news. We should be inundated with information for these verifiable diaries that Fauci wrote that we now have access to. Not a word. It just vanished. So if the news media is not willing to report on this, what is that? What does that do to public life and to the public mind? I mean, Tony, what it means is that we have to, and we've done a good job of it, but not nearly good enough, we have to develop our alternative information sources. You know, MAHA Action and the MAHA Institute and so on, Brownstone Institute, CHD, there's all these small organizations that are desperately trying to get news out to... The American people that they need for their sake of their health and their well-being. But our infrastructure and our resources are small compared to what we're battling, which is basically Goliath. Really, it really is. And, you know, we're dealing with, you know, such incredible government corruption, corporate corruption, and then media corruption that sort of covers it all up. I mean, that's just, it really is an insane setup. When you think of, you know, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of vaccine injured people, and not a single newspaper in the country will cover it. And then the answer is, why would they cover it? They're not really news organizations. They're working for their advertisers and for their partners. That's where their money comes from. So. And Tony, if I could say so. I know many of these reporters, and you do too, right? We work with them every day, and I send them whatever kind of information I can. Even if they want to report it, they can't get past their editors. And even if the editor wants to report, they can't get past the publisher. And even if the publisher wants to report it, they have to obey the advertisers. So who's ultimately in charge of our news? It's the advertisers. They're the people that pay the bills. It's not you as the subscriber. The bulk of the revenue source is their advertising. And the bulk of the advertisers are pharmaceutical companies who don't want any of this discussed. What this means for the American people, for anybody who's concerned about their health and well-being and flourishing of their families and their communities, is that you have an absolute obligation to seek out other sources of information. Everybody should be subscribing. To every information source that I just mentioned earlier, including Maha Action and Brownstone and CHD, you can go through the list. It's the only way you're going to find out. And thank goodness for platforms like X, without which, all of which were censored during COVID, remember, but without these platforms, we would have no means to get the word out. But we have to develop these alternative information infrastructures. So send these links to your friends. Get people to sign up to get on our emails. Watch the Zoom shows that we do. Hang out on X shows. You have to inform yourself because you sure can't depend on the national media to inform you. Thanks, Jeffrey. It's just, you know, this is something that we're going to just hit really hard day after day. And Politico, I think, is just the tip of the iceberg. But the idea, I mean, I was really shocked. When I, when I learned how much money they were getting from the government. So they're getting paid by the government and they're also getting paid by the companies that want access to the government. So they're just getting paid and they're getting paid and they're getting paid. And it's just a disinformation campaign to deceive the American public. It's harming the American public. We're getting chronic disease and they're making millions of dollars. So that has to stop. And if we don't tell the world who will. That's right. Thanks, Jeffrey. Next up, we have Del Bigtree, and he is an award-winning producer for his work on the Doctors TV series, but he's done so much more since then. So in 2016, he produced the film Vaxxed from Cover-Up to Catastrophe, and then just done incredible work on the documentary An Inconvenient Study. And he's the founder and CEO of the Informed Consent Action Network, which has filed just a ton of cases. He's done a ton of lawsuits and FOIAs on behalf of the American people. He's also the host of the High Wire. So he's just a fireball, a firebrand. He was the director of the presidential campaign or in the top group for RFK in 2024. Just done an incredible job. Welcome, Del. Let's get into the details. Tony, thank you for having me. It's an honor. It's an honor to be following Cheryl Atkinson, Jeffrey Tucker. It's just an honor to be here amongst such high class journalists and really some of the last living journalists, I think, on this planet right now. So anyway, yeah. Yeah, Dale, I want to start with a kind of a question that I was curious whether you even knew or how you feel when you hear. That, you know, Bayer and BASF and all these kinds of companies are paying Politico millions and millions of dollars, but then the government, so look at some of these stats. HHS in 2025 paid Politico $1.5 million. The Interior Department paid them $1.2 million. The Energy Department paid them $1.2 million. The USDA paid them $532,000. Transportation paid them $472,000. The EPA paid them $458,000. And I could just go on and on and on and on. So the point is, they're getting paid so much money from the government. And then, you know, for access to this great information that's coming from all these companies that are trying to poison the American public. I mean, it's just a monumental travesty. That everybody has to be aware of, that they're just being lied to and they're being poisoned. And then these kinds of places criticize us and they criticize us because we're the competition. So I don't know. What's your thought about that? That kind of setup? Well, I mean, you've just basically laid out the definition of propaganda. And I think I often say that in many ways, Russia, China and North Korea are better off than we are here in America because at least their citizens know that their media is lying to them. The biggest problem we have in America is we are still under this belief in some way. That the media is telling us the truth, that it's reporting on things that are important. And the opposite is true. It has really become, and I think I'm not surprised at all by this. I've been saying it for years, so have you. But it's great when a report comes out like this where you get the hard evidence. You can't, the entire purpose of the Fourth Estate, which is what our founding fathers Others described the media or the news As the fourth state, the fourth branch of government, it's the one that the government doesn't control. And it's the only way you can have capitalism in a free nation is if there's a group of people that don't bow or are not owned by any of your industries, any of your government. These are the things that can always rob us of freedom. I mean, we were told from the moment this country was founded that we would have to be vigilant. And they pointed out exactly issues Like this, that you must always have. have a free press. That doesn't mean a free press that can get into any room you want. It means a free press that takes no money from industry or government so that it can be free to hold the feet to the fire of any corporation that's trying to take over the government or any government that's trying to, you know, push an agenda upon the people. And I really asked myself, I was just doing an interview with Jeffrey Tucker last week. We were talking about this. And I wonder what these journalists think they're doing. Do they realize that it's propaganda? You know, I worked at CBS. It becomes clear, you know, when you are crossing the line, you usually maybe do it once. You'll take a story too far, maybe hit pharma a little bit too hard, some specific company like Pfizer, and they let you know, your executive producers let you know you are never going to do something like that again. Um, or you'll lose your job and it comes from the very top. And Jeffrey Tucker was right. The advertisers are funding the media. And we've talked about this 50 to 70% of your advertising on television is coming from the pharmaceutical industry. And I want to make it really clear, since this is the focus, and I've said this before, working in television, people that work in Hollywood know this for a fact. We know that that box. On the wall or sitting in your house, that is actually a billboard. It's not seen as an entertainment vehicle. We all make money trying to sell entertainment. But the idea is we want to show that we can hold enough eyeballs. This is the entire game in Hollywood, whether it's a sitcom, whether it's the news, whether it's a drama, whether it's a spy show, whatever it is. You have to show that you're holding eyeballs on the screen so that when the ads come up, that determines the value of your show. How many eyeballs were still watching when that advertising happened? So it's just a billboard. And the sooner people realize that, especially their. This is their news now that it's just the same type of entertainment funded by the advertisers. Just watch the commercials. You want to know what's running your country. Watch your news show and then watch what commercials run between the news anchor. When you think that news anchor is telling you the truth, just realize they can't say anything about the advertisers that are funding their show. We've got to start looking at this a different way. We have Cali means pointing out all the corruption inside of government. But what do you do if all of the reporting is just advertising? We need real journalism. Jeffrey Tucker pointed it out. How is nobody talking about the fact that the guy that locked down our country has a diary saying he knew he was lying to the public on virtually every principle that we were living by? Social distancing wasn't real. He knew it was probably of lab origin, but got a bunch of scientists to say otherwise. These are the things that should be news. When your news is not reporting on it, we have a problem. During this entire last election, my last point is this. During this midterm election, all of this discussion about the economy, where was the conversation? One news channel talked about the conversation of why are we in the deficit we're in? We're in it because of COVID. What did we do during COVID that hurt our economy? How bad was our economy coming out of COVID? What do we expect any leader to be able to do in one or two years? Could they overturn all of that? How much of the COVID pandemic did we get wrong? If it happened again, would there be a way to protect our economy? None of these conversations are happening. None of them are happening because they want to be able to do that again. Then they want the pharmaceutical industry to be exonerated or never thought of having had an impact in our lives, even though they were wrapped up with WHO, wrapped up with this sort of global approach. To our sovereignty and attempting to take it away. So we have work to do as citizens. We've got to all start looking. The greatest media there is, is your own voice. Our First Amendment right is what runs this country. And if we lose it, we lose everything. We all need to exercise that. We need to talk to our loved ones. We're about to have a Thanksgiving holiday here. It's time to have these conversations. What is news? Are we getting news? Because I think based on this vote, it looks like America's pretty well aligned on what We want cheaper gas, we want a stronger economy, and we don't want to be in any more wars. So why don't we get our conversations to what we want, not who we want. Let's get it to what? Are we all agreed? No war? Are we all agreed gas should come down, that maybe we shouldn't be stopping oil licenses and things like that, or suing oil makers to make them charge, you know, so that they have to charge more money to handle the lawsuits? These are the types of things that are the conversations we need to have. We the people are the voice, especially when we have no money. Thank you for giving me the time, Tony. No, that was great. And it's just so clear. We are living in 1984. You know, we are we are getting lied to. The news that we listen to is just propaganda. It's marketing for companies that are trying to poison us. So, you know, telling the truth is a revolutionary act here. And like you said, you know, we have to fight to get the truth. We have to fight, you know, like Jeffrey said, to disseminate the truth. And, you know, like Jeffrey said, too. You know, vaccine injuries are flooding bars, and all we hear is vaccines are safe and effective, nothing to see here, and nothing's happening. So it's a tough world, and we have a tough battle, but we have to come out swinging every day and tell the world what's going on, because it's easy to prove. Thanks, Dale. This was great. Thank you, Tony. I appreciate it. Next up, we have Dr. Eric Berg, and he's known as the knowledge doc. That's so important because getting the truth, like I said, it's revolutionary. Just hearing simple truths are so hard to find. And so, you know, Dr. Berg has been telling 45 million people across all of his platforms, simple truths, simple common sense truths that are going to make them healthier. And it's the biggest way that you can possibly push back. against all the lies and the propaganda and all the things that are making us sick. So, you know, he's just an incredible thinker, writer, researcher, and it's great to have you on once again, Eric. Thank you so much, Tony. And yeah, that's my goal is to get people, not just to give them information, but get them to think more clearly. So today we're going to talk a little bit about, you know, the food pyramid again, but there's some interesting things about it, Especially in relationship to... The school system, right, because earlier this year, RFK finally flipped the food pyramid completely upside down. Now we have real meat, real eggs, full fat dairy, whole food. Now it's at the top, right? Ultra processed food is officially the enemy for once. This is exciting. But the answer is like, why aren't American kids right now in 2024, still 62% of them, their calories are from ultra processed foods at the school system. Why is that? That's not good. Well, the reason comes down to a loophole that most people don't even know about it. That's what I want to share with you because it's called the USDA Food Processing Program. So this is how it works. Big food companies like Tyson's. Kraft Heinz, they're using it to intercept real food before it even reaches the child's tray. And the loophole is like this. It's how it works. And I hope you're sitting down because this is mind-blowing. Taxpayers, that's you and me, pay for real single-ingredient foods to be bought for schools. Chicken, beef, cheese, clean food. Listen to this. 46% of that food, and in some Eighty one percent. It never makes it to the school. Instead, the school district ships that taxpayers funded meat directly to the corporate factories like Tyson's Foods. Tyson's takes our clean chicken. And then what they do is they inject it with corn syrup solids, maltodextrin, which is industrial starch, modified corn starch, soy protein concentrates. Then they put their logo on the box. Then they ship and charge the school back. They ship it to the school, and then they charge the school for it. And then they take our beef and cheese. They turn it into 36-ingredient pizza pockets loaded with dextrose, nitrates, synthetic gums. So they're taking this real food, this food that you and I paid for, and turning it into a chemical product. And then they sell it back to your kid's school. Completely bizarre. Now, how is any of this legal after they change the food guidelines? Well, for decades, the old system physically gutted 93% of the school's kitchens. They removed the stoves. They removed the hoods. They left the freezers and the warming ovens. So the schools literally can't even cook anymore, even if they wanted to. So right now, food lobbyists are are really fighting, hardcore, this legal definition of what altered processed food actually means. And the administration is really trying to work out right now to define this word because it's so important. Because as long as there's no official legal definition, a product with 36 ingredients and synthetic chemicals can still hit that protein number or that whole grain number on paper. Here's what Senator Kennedy and USDA launched, what's called the Harvest to Hallways Program. It puts tens of thousands of dollars into kitchen equipment and local farm-to-school food. And this is amazing. The challenge is, well, the problem is they only invested like $70 million, and there's 95,000 schools. So it doesn't really... Uh, provide enough income for that. So they're going to have to really work on getting more money to that. But, but the, but that's like part of the problem is the core, the loophole stays open, which is, has to do with the definition. That's where the real problem comes in. So what really needs to happen is this, we need a federal definition of ultra processed foods. And this way we can ban the chemical version of this commodity. Um, so we need to make sure that the new food pyramid doesn't just exist on a poster somewhere that it needs to show up in front of these. So as real food, single ingredient foods, um, need to fit the definition of actual food and not ultra processed foods. But let's just, I want to just share with you, there's actually two definitions of food that you need to know about. There's a biological one. Which basically is that which is eaten to sustain life and promote the growth and repair of tissue. But that's not the one they're using. They're using a second definition. It's a legal definition. And it's a loophole. Okay. And I think you might want to be sitting down to hear this definition because. I'm dead serious. This is what the legal definition of food is right now. Articles used for food or drink or man or other animals, chewing gum, and articles used for components of any such article. I'm not kidding. This is an actual legal definition. I think you can see the problem. That needs to go away. We need to define ultra processed foods as anything that does not fit the biological definition of food. And then we'll be able to get the real food in front of kids at their school. Thank you very much, Tony. Thanks, Eric. I mean, it is a crazy system where we have a government that can't even define food, right? I mean, it's just... It's just a crazy time. And, you know, so then so we've got such incredible government corruption, such incredible corporate corruption and such disdain for the health and the honesty, you know, towards all of us. And then we've got a news media that doesn't do any tough reporting on the companies that are doing these terrible things to us and killing, you know, more than a million people each year. You know, more than 1.7 million people die each year from chronic disease. And, you know, Kennedy says 85% of that is preventable. So that means that it's preventable by lifestyle changes, mainly by not putting certain poisonous, you know, toxic chemicals in our body and all these different products. And. We can't make those decisions unless we can get information that's honest, that's truthful, that will help us, you know, give us the tools to protect ourselves. So, and that all of these same companies, even the government, they're going to attack the people who are trying to tell the American public the truth, whether it's you, me, Maha. Secretary Kennedy, and I fully expect congressional hearings. So the government is going to keep protecting these companies. And there's been a blue wave now, not a question of whether it's a blue wave or a red wave. These are politicians who across the board, for the last generation, have protected the companies that are harming us. And until they stop doing that, we're going to have a swing back and forth because the American public knows something's wrong and they always want change, but they don't get it. When their government is going to investigate the people who are trying to do something about it and protect these corporate interests who are coming after us. And, you know, this show is about Politico, but Politico is just a microcosm of a system that has lied to all of us for the past generation. And they're they're a particularly bad, you know. System that they've, you know, set up, you know, where they're just getting paid on all sides and we are losing the American taxpayers are losing the American public is is getting duped. And, you know, so we have to do something. And this really makes me think about the 1950s with Operation Mockingbird, where we had the CIA meeting with newspapers, with radio people, with Hollywood, with everybody who conveyed information to the public. And, you know, they were lying to us for that whole sort of 25, 26 year period up to 1976, where George Bush, head of the CIA at the time, came out and he said, we've been doing this. We apologize. We promise to stop. Right. So what I think has happened is that. Whether it's the CIA or some big corporation, none of it has stopped. Our media is still captured. It's still lying to us. It's still purveying this propaganda that's making us all sick. And I want everybody in America to know that they're going to have to work hard to get the truth, and they're going to have to work hard to protect their own health. And they should not believe what their government tells them. They should not believe what these corporations tell them. And they should not believe. Most of all, what the media has been telling them, because investigative journalism is dead. And we just have a few people who are brave enough to come out and tell the truth. Thanks, Tony. Thanks, Eric. So that is our show for today. So we're going to spend, you know, the coming weeks really looking at. The companies, the organizations, the government officials who are not doing things in the interests of the American public. We have a chronic disease epidemic in this country. The CDC says 1.7 million people dying each year. We're told that 85 percent, I'm going to say it time after time, 85 percent of these deaths are preventable. That is more important than anything. That is more important than infectious disease. It is more important than any other issue in public health. that we can stop these deaths, we can end chronic disease, but we have to end corruption before we can do that. Thanks for tuning in and we will see you next week at 4 p.m. on Wednesday. America's children are sick and moms have been betrayed. The time for empty promises long past. Now is a time for action. Maha is the most powerful force of collective action in generations. The grassroots power of moms and activists has created an army of health warriors with more reach than all mainstream media combined. Together, we can end the chronic disease epidemic. Maha's influence is reaching millions. It's reaching Congress. And that energy, these chain reactions are working. How about Operation Stork Speed? Dozens of food companies removing toxic ingredients. I plan to lead by example. Maha is now. We're talking about how to change the culture. The American people want America healthy again. It is a renaissance moment in health in America. For health, freedom, and the truth, join us at Maha Action.