Month: April 2025

Diet, Government, Health

MAHA Saves Your Life With Red Dye Ban

You may not realize it, but you owe a huge thank you to RFK Jr. I’m not embellishing at all when I say that he may very well have saved your life. Banning artificial dyes might be a death blow to evil Big Pharma, Big Food, Big Ag, Big Oil et al. and puts us on a road to healthy living. It’s not hyperbole to say that getting rid of Red Dye #40 may cut obesity rates in the United States by 83%. Seriously – you can look it up on Instagram. As the smarmy boss Bill Lumbergh in Office Space often said, “Mmmm, Yeeeah”….

I’m just going to have to say it – RFK Jr. has to be Trump’s worst cabinet pick. Trump got bamboozled by a glorified Wellness Influencer (TM). Well, to be fair he needed JFK’s voting block and figured HHS would be a do no harm consolation prize in exchange. The problem with Wellness Influencers is that they drift somewhere in between uninformed but well intentioned, to full on grifter and snake oil salesman. I was willing to give RFK Jr. benefit of the doubt until I listened to his speech describing his ban of artificial food dyes.

Look, I’m a fan of science. Actual science, driven by the Scientific Method should be the gold standard. And when talking about human health we should rely primarily on human outcome data, not mechanistic, in vitro, or rodent studies to make big decisions. Crazy, right? What do the actual human outcome studies say about something? Preferably a meta analysis of a large number of studies.

This is where RFK Jr. lost me – in his speech he spouts numbers and statistics that are made up and/or completely misleading in order to make his point. He’s the master of conflating correlation with causation and stating it as fact. In other words he uses the exact playbook the Wellness Influencers utilize. He even had a bunch of them there with him – Mark Hymen, The Food Babe, Calley Means. They’re all experts at taking something that has a kernel of truth and using that to extrapolate blanket statements about a particular subject that very few people will ever read the actual studies or ask questions. They get away with it because nobody in the media will ever bother to question them. Why would they – it’s all about health, right?

Here’s the first example that jumped out of RFK Jr. using extremely misleading data. He stated in his speech, “There was zero spent in this country treating chronic disease when my uncle was president. Today it’s about $1.8 trillion annually. It’s bankrupting our nation. 74% of American kids cannot qualify for military service. How are we going to maintain our global leadership with such a sick population?”

Wow, that sounds bad! Of course we should do something! Here’s the sleight of hand that happens – the 74% figure is true (it’s actually 77%). The problem is that in the context of the “chronic disease” he’s addressing, only 18% of kids are disqualified due to obesity or other health issues. The rest are disqualified due to criminal records, drug use, tattoos and ear gages, inability to pass the basic academic tests, etc… So he’s completely misleading the public with a false statistic to make his point sound more dramatic.

In the world of science, that’s malfeasance. He’s a smart guy. I don’t believe it was by accident because he does it over and over again. His speech is rife with that sort of thing. It’s cherry picking data to support your opinion – the classic Wellness Influencer/Grifter move. Once do you start doing that regularly it’s impossible to take anything you say seriously. If he were the run of the mill TikTok influencer I wouldn’t care. I have the choice to believe Gary Brecka, The Glucose Goddess, Bobby Parish, or Dr. Berg if I want. I don’t have a choice when the HHS Secretary is using bad or cherry picked data to make decisions.

His decision to ban his list of artificial dyes is projected to cost industrial production somewhere between the high hundred millions to low billion dollars in retooling, labeling, regulation compliance, and supply chain disruption/procurement changes. The current guess is a 10-15% cost increase passed on to consumers.

All for what? A few nebulous studies that say ultra high doses of some dyes might lead to hyperactivity in kids? Really, that’s it? Ah but the EU banned those dyes, why wouldn’t we? Did you know that many of those dyes ARE used in the EU, just under a different name? Or that many of the “natural” dyes used in the EU are banned by the U.S.? Did you know some of the red dye substitutes the EU uses are derived from cochineal insects (Dactylopius coccus) and that resulting acid is a red anthraquinone glycoside, and is often used as a sodium or calcium salt for solubility. That sounds like a yummy additive for your kids yogurt (it’s in cosmetics as well).

So the first move out of the gate for the MAHA movement is to ban something that I guarantee nobody even thought about prior to this election cycle, to fix an problem that nobody can actually prove is impacting anyone, at an enormous cost to the consumer. Way to go MAHA! But at least my ingredients are “natural” now and not some scary sounding chemical name. Pssst – everything is a chemical, even natural things.

I honestly appreciate that the Administration wants to make America healthy again. It should be a priority. But blaming my obesity on Nabisco and ultra palatable foods is like blaming my speeding tickets on Ford because my car is capable of going 120 MPH. Twinkies were invented in 1930 and the calorie content is the same today as it was then (yes, I looked it up). The reason we didn’t have an obesity crisis back then and we do now is multi-faceted… but I guarantee some mysterious chemical and processing done by an evil food cabal is not the root cause. Lack of physical activity, advertising, portion size, mental health, and body positivity movements come way ahead of chemicalphobia in the list of reasons.

I don’t know what the thinking was behind attacking food dyes as the first priority for MAHA, but it was a bad look. Coming out with a gaggle of Wellness Influencers, pseudoscience, and questionable statistics does not inspire confidence.

I can hardly wait until he goes after seed oils. The Wellness Influencers will be barking like performing seals, overjoyed that they’ve mandated deep frying french fries in beef tallow. It’s all about health you know.

Daily Life, Government, Politics, Solving the wrong problem, woke

What Do They Want?

Yesterday was the national “Hands Off!” protest. Watching the protests unfold across the country, I was inspired. So powerful. Speaking truth to power. I can hardly wait until the “Fight the Oligarchy Tour” comes to my town next week! Sorry, just kidding. The sheer ridiculousness of these “movements” is the perfect demonstration of what’s wrong with the democratic party today. I have absolutely no frigg’n idea what they’re actually protesting or what they want?

I visited the Hands Off! and Bernie’s Oligarchy Tour websites to see if they listed what they’re protesting against. Nothing. Just pithy sayings and links to order protest signs. “Musk is not my president!, Hands off immigrants!, Hands off DC!, Tax the billionaires!”. You’d think the organizers would want to put forth actual talking points and information describing what they want or what the alternative plan is… but you’d be wrong.

If you disagree with Trump’s tariff plan or closing the border or cutting taxes, that’s fine – then explain what your plan is. This is the problem with the left’s message – nobody has any idea what they actually want. To the best I can tell they want to open the border again, the national debt doesn’t matter, they clearly don’t like cutting government waste and fraud, and are happy with the current globalist trade structure. Am I wrong?

Yeah, but Elon is a Nazi and Trump is just protecting his billionaire friends! Hah! Counter that you white nationalist pig!! Protesting something is fine but without articulating an alternative, you’re just stomping your feet like a petulant child. The closest to having a plan is Bernie, whose sole focus in life is to tax the billionaires because somehow that’s going to fix our financial mess.

The irony is that for the first time we have an administration willing to expose just how badly the little guy has been getting screwed by the government. The true oligarchy is the defense industrial complex, politicians, and DC deep state entities that have bent you over and forced you to take it up the ass for years. The government has pissed away every tax dollar taken from me in my entire working life in about 30 seconds. Since I have to write the annual check to the government this week… I’m fucking angry about my money being forcibly seized and wasted. And the Left’s response is – please stop exposing and cutting the waste? Help me understand how this is your action plan for the working man??

Destroying Teslas and chanting that Trump and Elon are only doing this to enrich themselves is so breathtakingly idiotic, it’s difficult to believe this is the actual strategy. I keep waiting for someone to intelligently articulate how going back to the Biden strategy (whatever that was) is how this country gets back on track. Please defend spending $1.5 million taxpayer dollars to fund a “voter confidence summit” in Liberia. Because if you don’t have either an alternative plan or a justification for the waste… then your idiotic protests will be treated as the clown show they appear to be.

My favorite signs from the protests are the ones with “Nobody elected Elon!”. So… you’re ok with shadowy, unelected bureaucrats pissing away $40+ billion a year at an agency like USAID – but man you’re REALLY pissed that someone is trying to make the government more efficient? Please help me make sense of that. Oh I know, it’s a giant conspiracy to funnel government money to Elon’s evil corporate oligarchy that you loved until last year. Sigh.

These are some strange times. It almost makes me want to return to the simplistic times when the Republicans were the party of the evil rich and the Democrats were the party of the working man. Simple talking points, clear lines in the sand. Everyone getting equally screwed by both parties behind the scenes. Ain’t politics fun?!?!