Amazing speech by Jason Karp regarding Health and Nutrition

Amazing speech by Jason Karp regarding Health and Nutrition
Largest Untested and Uncontrolled science experiment on humans and food in world's history.
https://x.com/newstart_2024/status/1845796067482149167

Great speech by Jason Karp: "Some of the problems that we're talked about today are actually not that hard. They're just hard to conclusively prove. Casey mentioned that we're having a spiritual crisis right now, and that partially entails the fact that we've lost our North Star. We have an over-reliance on scientific studies at the expense of common sense.

Based on what Dr. Palmer said, we don't need 10 years of clinical controlled studies to know that we shouldn't have plastic in our brains. We don't need 10 years of studies to know that if there's a pesticide that kills every insect, every microorganism, that we don't need 10 years of study to know that we should not be putting that in mass quantities in our bodies.

So now to prepared remarks. I've been a professional investor for 26 years dealing with big food companies, seeing what happens in their boardrooms and why we now have so much ultra-processed food. With proof there are ways to responsibly scale food, I am also the co-founder of Few Kitchen, a health food company where we created the number one premium chocolate in the US without using chemicals, synthetics, and being 100% organic. And this is a deeply personal issue for me today.

After miraculously curing an incurable eye disease that was making me blind in my 20s by using food as medicine, I have dedicated the last 23 years of my life to researching and trying to clean up our uniquely toxic American food system. Given the exponential rise in our chronic diseases in just the last 50 years, many ask, how did we get here and what has changed? Americans now live in a toxic soup of synthetic chemicals, plastics, and untenable pesticide that permeate our food, water, and air.

Having studied the evolution of corporations, I believe the root cause of how we got here is an unintended consequence of the unchecked and misguided industrialization of agriculture and food. I believe there are two key drivers behind how we got here. First, America has much looser regulatory approach to approving new ingredients and chemicals than comparable developed countries.

Europe, for example uses a guilty until proven innocent standard for the approval of new chemicals, which mandates that if an ingredient might pose a potential health risk, it should be restricted or banned for up to 10 years until it is proven safe. In complete contrast, our FDA uses an innocent until proven guilty approach for new chemicals or ingredients that's known as grass or generally recognized as safe.

This recklessly allows new chemicals into our food system until they are proven harmful. Shockingly, U.S. food companies can use their own independent experts to bring forth a new chemical without the approval of the FDA. It is a travesty that the majority of Americans don't even know they are constantly exposed to thousands of untested ingredients that are actually banned or regulated in other countries.

To put it bluntly, for the last 50 years, we have been running the largest uncontrolled science experiment ever done on humanity without their consent. Why should America, the greatest country on Earth, be the last developed nation to protect its people?

And the proof is in the pudding. Our health differences, compared to those other countries who use stricter standards, are overwhelmingly conclusive when looking at millions of people over decades. On average, Europeans live around five years longer, have less than half our obesity rates, have significantly lower chronic disease, have markedly better mental health, and they spend as little as one-third on health care per person as we do in this country.

While lobbyists and big food companies may say we cannot trust the standards of these other countries because it overregulates, it stifles innovation, and it bans new chemicals prematurely, I would like to point out that we trust many of these other countries enough to have nuclear weapons. These other countries have demonstrated it is indeed possible to not only have thriving with a clear do-no-harm approach towards anything that humans put in or on our bodies.

The second driver, how we got here, is all about incentives. U.S. industrial food companies have been myopically incentivized to reward profit growth, yet bear none of the social costs of poisoning our people and our land. Since the 1960s, America has seen the greatest technology and innovation boom in history.

As Big Food created some of the largest companies in the world, so too did their desire for scaled efficiency. Companies had noble goals of making the food safer, more shelf-stable, cheaper, and more accessible. However, they also figured out how to encourage more consumption by making food more artificially appealing with brighter colors and engineered taste and texture. This is the genesis of ultra-processed food.

Because of these misguided regulatory standards, American companies have been highly skilled at maximizing profits without bearing the societal costs. They have replaced natural ingredients with chemicals, they have commodified animals into industrial widgets, and they treat our God-given planet as an inexhaustible, abusable resource. Sick Americans are learning the hard way that food and agriculture should not be scaled in the same ways as iPhones.

After watching this go on for too long, and spending a lot of time with Vani, earlier this year I filed a shareholder activist letter against Kellogg for selling a less safe, inferior version of their cereals to American families. As Vani pointed out, very few Americans know that Kellogg sells a safer, cleaner version of their cereals in Europe than the ones they sell here. They use more chemicals in the U.S. version because it is more profitable and because we allow them to. The absurd question we should all be asking today is why shouldn't American children receive the safest version of products that Kellogg already makes? To highlight the perverse incentives, Senator, Kellogg declined to meet with us and effectively told us that American children prefer the brighter colors.

And they will continue selling the more toxic versions as long as it's, quote, compliant with applicable relevant laws. Which is why I'm here today. We need your help to stop this behavior.

Because of our lax regulations and public company incentives to prioritize profits over safety, millions of Americans are constantly subjected to uncontrolled trials of chemicals that are banned or regulated all over the world. While there may be many difficult issues discussed today, this one is easy because healthier countries are already showing us how it can be done.

By adopting the same chemical regulatory approach of healthier developed nations, we can take a significant and absolutely necessary step in both providing safer food and lowering health care costs for all Americans. We can reverse this great American poisoning, and we already have a playbook on how to do it."