What Does America's Medical Industry Have in Common With the Michelin Star Rating?
America is the sickest wealthy nation in history. Now is our chance to fix that.
A couple years ago, my buddy Jim asked me “what motivates you to do all this stuff?” We were talking about my weird habits of prolonged fasting, strict Keto diet, heavy lifting, cold showers without soap or shampoo, making my own deodorant, and the like.
My answer: “I want to destroy the American medical industry.”
Praise Jesus that Donald J. Trump has appointed Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to do just that: destroy the medical industry as we’ve known it for the past 45 years.
This post explains why you, too, should hate the medical industry, distrust your doctor, and cheer for Kennedy’s success in the war against a crooked, ill-educated, smug, overpaid, greedy, and deceitful class.
A Sick, Sick Land
Despite spending more on healthcare in gross dollars and per capital than any nation in the history of humanity, the United States is the sickest wealthy country that ever existed. Each additional dollar spent on healthcare reduces life expectancy, destroys quality of life, and increases the incidence of chronic disease.
Meanwhile, healthcare is the fastest growing segment of the US economy and has been since the late 1970s. Only education costs increase as fast.
The uninitiated might say, “well, the medical industry doesn’t know what it’s doing.” What if I told you, though, that the medical industry knows exactly what’s it doing?
America’s modern medical industry—which includes the FDA, CDC, NIH, the major medical and specialty associations, hospitals, doctors groups, medical universities, and, of course, big pharmaceutical companies—copied the Michelin Tire company’s star rating system in order create demand for their products.
The Michelin Star System
If you’ve ever wondered why an automobile tire company started rating restaurants, I’ll treat you to a little history courtesy of Capital One:
The Michelins believed that a travel-promotion guide with information on trip planning, do-it-yourself maintenance, and a little food along the way would encourage those early adopters of automobiles to drive more — and create more rubber-tire business at the same time. They started the Michelin Guide in 1900 to further that goal.
In 1920, Michelin expanded their guide from a single star to one, two, or three stars. Though the company denies it, three star restaurants tended to be remote, requiring a longer drive than one- or two-star eateries. The guide encourages people with automobiles to get out of the house and drive an hour for dinner—putting wear and tear on their tires. As evidence, here is the rating guide from 1932:
1 star meant – high quality cooking, worth a stop
2 stars meant – excellent cooking, worth a detour
3 stars meant – exceptional cuisine, worth a detour
It’s as simple as that. Michelin created demand for road trips to excellent restaurants that would lead to faster tire replacement. As the number one or number two tire manufacturer in the world, Michelin didn’t need to promote its brand. When consumers replaced tires, there was high probability they would choose Michelin tires simply because Michelin was the most available. (Anheuser Busch in the late 1990s used the same tactic of growing the beer market independent of its own brand advertising because AB products dominated store beer fridges. They knew the hands of consumers needing beer were most likely to land on a case of their product, so the goal was to get to people to drink their beer stock faster.)
The Medical Industry’s Business Model Is Chronic Disease
The medical industry has three ways to make money:
Prevention
Acute care
Chronic care
Prevention can be lucrative, but it’s hard work. People are resistant to prevention except in particular moments, like when a child is growing up. And prevention requires a constant supply of new humans. Once a human has had all the vaccines and acquired all the healthy habits, the medical industry might not see them for years until they encounter a need for acute care.
Acute care is (or was) what you got at the emergency room: deep cuts, broken bones, bullet wounds, appendicitis, tonsillitis, the usual fare. But acute care could also cover more extreme problems. Accute care can be very expensive to the consumer, but it presents numerous problems for the medical industry. For one, it’s unpredictable. Injuries and acute illness happen at inconvenient times, requiring hospitals and other care facilities to over staff for peaks that may not happen. That means paying for more building than you need most of the time and paying salaries to staff who are often idle. Another problem with acute medicine is that, once the acute condition is properly treated, the customer goes away and never returns. Which is the point of this famous cartoon.
What the medical industry wanted was a steady stream of mildly sick people who never get better but require constant treatment, a form of annuity income.
Chronic care is the panacea. Chronic conditions are those the medical industry deems “incurable” (which is usually a lie) and requiring monitoring, counseling, tests, pharmaceuticals, and regular visits to the doctor. Chronic conditions provide the system with an annuity income stream of high-margin interventions. Diabetes, dyslipidemia, chronic pain, certain cancers, heart disease, hypertension, arthritis, kidney disease, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, dermatological conditions, and, everyone’s favorite, depression fit into the chronic condition category. Chronic disease management costs $42 trillion a year, a number that increases much faster than inflation, even when Joe Biden’s president.
Chronic disease management (never prevention or cure) is what drives ALL of modern medicine, now that the Covid scam has subsided. Chronic disease management does everything prevention and acute treatment cannot: it provides predictable recurring revenue to the system. Hospitals no longer need to over staff ERs in the hopes a kid breaks a leg skateboarding. They can schedule the kid’s dad for a monthly blood test to “manage” his type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and national-debt-dwarfing triglyceride count.
Some will say, “sure, but the increase in chronic conditions is a natural result of an aging population.” You would think. But the numbers tell a different story.
A recent study comparing the prevalence of 17 chronic diseases among various age groups between 2005 and 2014 found increases in nearly every disease, including in the youngest groups in the study: 35-50 years old and 51-65 years old.Children have similarly suffered from increasing rates of chronic disease. Less than 2 percent of children in 1960 had a health condition severe enough to interfere with activities of daily life; 50 years later, more than 8 percent of children had such a condition. 1
In other words, age-related chronic disease is becoming more prevalent among the young than among the old. But the aging population explains how this screwed up system came about in the first place. And, like most problems in the world today, it all began with the Baby Boomers.
The Baby Bust Threatened the Medical Industry
Until the the late 1960s, the medical industry was content with dispensing routine vaccines and good advice to patients (prevention) and setting broken arms or removing hot appendixes (acute). As we said earlier, these two aspects of medicine need only a new crop of humans to provide adequate revenue, and the Baby Boom (1946 to 1961) was supplying all the fresh kids they could ask for. But the boom ended about the time of JFK’s assassination when the world’s attention shifted to the risk of nuclear war and birth control pills flooded the market.
By 1965, demographers and medical chief financial officers realized the boom was ending, that the next generation would be tiny in comparison the present generation of young people, and that hospitals, doctors, and their vendors were “overbuilt” for the future. Either the industry would need to shrink, or it would need a new excuse to drag people in.
About the same time, researchers were discovering statistical links between behaviors and chronic conditions that grandmothers always knew about but scientists somehow missed. Smoking, heavy drinking, sedentary lifestyles, and, most distinctly, obesity all correlated with high incidence of chronic illness, both cross-sectionally and longitudinally. Public health organizations began campaigns to discourage risky behaviors, including the first surgeon-general warning about cigarettes in 1964. But the more creative folks in the medical industry were not so fast to condemn disease-causing behaviors. These financial geniuses realized what we outlined above: chronic disease is an annuity revenue stream par excellence. With the cigarette cat out of the bag, they looked at the next-leading cause of chronic illness: obesity.
Obesity, and the chronic inflammation associated with it, is the lifeblood of the modern medical industry. Obesity works two ways:
The diet required to achieve obesity is, itself, a leading cause of inflammation.
Once achieved, obesity triggers additional chronic conditions.
Making Medical Customers Through Government
In the 1970s, the medical industry decided to leverage the federal government to push people to get fat and sick, working alongside big agriculture to use grains as the primary vehicle. The timing was spectacular.
Richard Nixon agreed in 1971 to sell huge amounts of grain to the Soviet Union. To meet the demand without driving up consumer prices, Congress provided massive incentives to grain farmers who responded the way you’d expect. They produced, year after year, bumper crops of grains—too much grain.
Working with nutritional “experts,” the Department of Agriculture revised an old food-groups guide. While the experts proposed recommending three to four servings of grains daily, pressure from medical and agricultural lobbyists persuaded the USDA to make the recommendation six to eleven servings a day. And, in 1980, the USDA unveiled the new “food pyramid” under guise of “healthy diet” but actually for the purpose of selling more grain and increasing the incidences of chronic disease.
For simplicity, let’s use a slice of whole-grain bread as an example of one serving of grain. Eleven slices of bread delivers 142 grams of carbohydrates and 759 calories. Eating according to the food pyramid, even using the minimum servings from each group, produces a 2,500 to 4,800 calorie a day diet, while the average 170 pound man burns about 1,800 calories a day. (See where this is going?) What’s worse is the distribution of calories, because, despite what your idiot doctor reads from a CDC poster, a calorie is not a calorie.
Those 142 grams of carbohydrates unleash an insulin storm in the body. Repeated day after day, the body stores the extra sugar derived from grains and fruits in fat cells throughout the body. And, because of the overabundance of insulin in the blood, cells start ignoring the growth signal insulin is supposed to trigger. So, the sugars attach to red blood cells, displacing oxygen. Sugar also requires cells to carry extra water molecules, and extra water is what we mean by “inflammation.”
The results were predictable by anyone who understands metabolism, which excludes 99% of licensed physicians.
When I was born, about 13 percent of American adults suffered from obesity, and just 3 percent were morbidly obese. Today, the majority of US adults are obese and over 10 percent morbidly so.
Now, look at the chart from USA Facts again. When did the jump occur?
Immediately after the introduction of the new food pyramid.
If you were in school when the new pyramid rolled out, you remember what a big deal it was. If you or a family worked in the medical field (as many in my family did), you remember the fridge and pantry being purged of fats and proteins which were replaced with Triscuits and Doritos, guaranteed “healthy” and “slimming” by every dietician, nutritionist, doctor, nurse, and public health agency in the country.
Then, you watched your belt disappear in a tunnel of fat that grew inexplicably around your waist.
Next, your energy disappeared like Jeb Bush’s. This was because insulin resistance meant cells were getting less sugar energy as sugar was diverted from kinetic fuel to potential fuel. Type II diabetes rates soared.
Look at the line before and after 1990, tens years after the new food pyramid debuted, exactly as would be expected from a decade of eating 200 grams of carbohydrates a day.
Now, we’ve seen how the food pyramid’s introduction, with a billion dollar PR campaign, affected rates of obesity and diabetes. But, did the scheme work? Did it feed cash into the greedy medical industry?
The largest decadal jump in healthcare spending happened in the decade of the 1980s—the decade immediately following the new food pyramid—at a whopping 157.12 percent. The second-largest jump of 70.8 percent occurred in the 1990s, as obesity, triggered by the food pyramid, developed into Type II diabetes.
Doctors Are Waking Up
Robert Lufkin MD is a physician, researcher, and medical school professor at the University of Los Angeles. His book, Lies I Taught in Medical School, destroys many mythical images we have of the all-knowing medical expert class. Lufkin wrote the book after curing himself (and many others) of metabolic diseases by doing the opposite of what he taught his students, who are now your doctors.
Lufkin’s mother was a registered hospital dietician who forced her family to eat according to the food pyramid religiously—a practice he carried into adulthood and fatherhood. He should have been the healthiest 40-year-old alive, but here is what happened.
Then I developed four diseases that I had been taught (and had taught others) were aging related with possibly a genetic component:
•Hypertension, which needed high blood pressure medicine;
•Gout arthritis, which I was prescribed drugs to control;
•Dyslipidemia (abnormal blood lipids), for which I was prescribed statins;
•Prediabetes (where glucose levels fall in a prediabetic range), for which I was prescribed another drug.2
Lufkin summarizes his shock (emphasis mine):
Obviously, I was concerned. And confused. How could this be happening? All the settled science told me this was impossible. I had been raised by a professional nutrition specialist, a certified dietitian, so I had eaten exactly as recommended by health organizations and the food pyramid. I’d been raised from birth in a system that assured me this couldn’t happen to someone my age.
I did everything right, and I was going to die.3
Lufkin spends the rest of the book teaching you about metabolism and its central (or solo) role in disease development and prevention. Obesity, type 2 diabetes, neurological diseases, heart diseases, cancer, joint pain are all caused by metabolic imbalances from diet or other environmental stresses. Yet, as Dr. Lufkin states, very few doctors know anything about metabolism.
We never talked about metabolism. To say that it was not the most popular or exciting subject in medical education would be an understatement. To us students, metabolism was just related to food and how it got broken down into building blocks for different cells. More commonly, we were taught about how food was metabolized into energy. I thought that was all there was to it. We all did.4
The damning confession here should be obvious:
Doctors who know almost nothing about metabolism
advising patients on what to eat
by regurgitating the government’s advice
which was designed to sell grain and produce lifelong customers for doctors.
Asking a doctor what you should eat is akin to walking into the local car dealership and asking the first salesman you see if you should buy a new car. Doctors are trained and financially incentivized to intervene, even in the healthiest of patients. We’ve all heard a doctor justify a prescription with words to the effect, “can’t hurt to feel even better, now, can it?”
The dietary interventions prescribed by government for the benefit of political donors and mindlessly parroted by supposed health experts (doctors) has turned the United States into the chronically sickest nation in the world. Were a meteor or coronal mass ejection wipe out modern technology, the United States as a whole would repeat the Roanoke lost colony. We would simply cease to exist as a people. A country like America cannot be built or sustained by fat, diabetic people who need seven daily prescriptions and monthly injections just to stay alive.
America is dying a slow, miserable death due to bad medical and dietary advice promulgated by the government and doctors for their own benefit.
Americans Sense Something Is Wrong
Some of my most vitriolic and sensational posts decrying the evils of modern medicine are also among the most read. And the centerpiece of this body of work was a 2017 post:
That post went viral because, through it, people recognized their own situations. Statistically speaking, readers of my blog are obese with three or more chronic conditions—because my readers are typical Americans over the age of 45. In 2017, I had shed fat and changed my diet and exercise routines in direct opposition to the advice of my doctors and the public health industry. My blood panels (which I buy myself to target very specific metrics that most doctors don’t even know exist) improved dramatically. And, though I still smoked the occasional cigarette, I was able to hold my breath up to 3.5 minutes. (It’s a gimmick, really. The need to breathe is triggered, not by lack of oxygen, but by too much carbon dioxide in the blood. Ketosis releases only about 1/10th the CO2 as sugar metabolism.)
It’s never popular to viciously attack the most trusted profession in the country, and, in 2017, medical workers were the most trusted people in the country. And, yet, my post accusing doctors of killing their patients (three years before Covid) went viral. Why?
Again, I believe the popularity of the post stemmed from recognition. Readers recognized the truth in what they were reading despite simultaneously believing doctors to be health experts concerned primarily with their patients’ wellbeing.
Readers also sensed that America’s trust in the medical industry was unjustified. How could our medical industry be both knowledgeable and altruistic when Americans, including my readers and their families, were getting sicker by the day?
Moreover, readers realized that costs and inconvenience of their conditions were not the worst part. The worst part was quality of life.
Another doctor, Jonathon Sullivan, wrote in his book The Barbell Prescription, a fantastic summary of life under the food pyramid and modern medical advice:
Will’s twin brother Phil displays the more common phenotype. Somewhere along the line, he took up smoking, drinking, and lots of quality time with his big screen TV. He’s planning on watching the entire third season of Battlestar Galactica this weekend…for the fourth time. To keep his edge, he drinks lots of Pepsi, and keeps scrupulously up to date on his Netflix queue. He’s a fiend for Domino’s Pizza and Doritos. He likes to cook with frozen ingredients and a microwave. His bodyfat is through the roof – he’s about 48% fat by weight – and he tips the scale at 283, about 70 lbs on his twin brother. He doesn’t like doctors, although he’s known to make frequent trips to the ER for chest pain, fatigue, sore joints, or a skin infection. He hasn’t had a real erection since the start of the Obama Administration. He has Type 2 diabetes, arthritis, messed-up serum lipids, and high blood pressure. He doesn’t know it yet, but he also has a ticking time bomb in his left anterior descending coronary artery. Three years from now, this lesion will clamp off the blood flow to Phil’s left ventricle in the middle of a Die Hard movie marathon. He’ll breathe his last in the cardiac ICU 6 weeks later, age 58.5
Tell me you don’t know at least one person whom Dr. Sullivan could be describing. Of course you do. It might be you.
A New Day Dawning
The good news for you or your brother or whomever this paragraph describes is two-fold:
It’s not your fault.
Help is on the way.
It’s not your fault because you, like Dr. Lufkin, simply did what you were told by people you were taught to defer to on all things health.
Help is on the way because Donald Trump rose from the deck to fight, fight, fight for you and our country, enlisting the help of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to destroy the modern medical industry as we’ve known it and replace it with a simple system that works.
Here is what Bobby Junior posted on X following Trump’s announcement of his appointment to head Health
https://x.com/RobertKennedyJr/status/1857198805919138235
But an earlier post made me jump up and cheer. This one could have been a paragraph in my 2017 post about doctor killing people. It’s exactly what Americans want to hear (emphasis added):
FDA’s war on public health is about to end. This includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals and anything else that advances human health and can't be patented by Pharma. If you work for the FDA and are part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you: 1. Preserve your records, and 2. Pack your bags.
If Robert F. Kennedy succeeds in his mission to reform the FDA, CDC, NIH, and Department of Health and Human Services, his appointment might well be the most important reform wrought by President Trump’s second term. No other reform will affect so many people, so intimately, and so permanently as reforms that reverse America’s physical decay into blobs of inflamed boils and tumors dying slowly and painful on Dorito-stained sofas.
When Jim asked me what keeps me going, it was not the Constitution or the republic or the flag. It was certainly not the pursuit of wealth or even a good five-dollar drunk. It was to upturn a corrupt and stupid medical industry that is robbing families of their wealth and killing us slowly with bad advice, toxic foods, and dangerous drugs.
Bobby Kennedy says he spent 30 minutes in prayer every morning 19 years asking God to give him the job of making America healthy again. God spared Trump’s life, in part, to grant Kennedy’s wish.
Deo gratias!
Lufkin, Robert. Lies I Taught in Medical School: How Conventional Medicine Is Making You Sicker and What You Can Do to Save Your Own Life (p. 7). BenBella Books. Kindle Edition.
ibid.
ibid (p. 29).
Sullivan, Jonathon M; Baker, Andy. The Barbell Prescription: Strength Training for Life After 40 (p. 28). The Aasgaard Company. Kindle Edition.