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This is not financial advice or recommendation for any investment. The Content is for informational purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.}

⬇️ Let’s get it

The Wellness Grift That They Won’t Tell You About

_{This one clocked in at 10 minutes. I should probably change my slogan…..}

Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) Jr. just got nominated as Health & Human Services (HSS) Secretary last week, which means one of the biggest anti-vaxxers in America is now basically in charge of U.S. healthcare policy.

What does this mean? RFK will oversee a roughly $1.7 trillion budget that affects everything from Medicare and Medicaid to public health agencies like the FDA, CDC, and NIH. The HHS Secretary can shape policies on drug approvals, healthcare access, pandemic response, and medical research — decisions that impact millions of lives (yours included).

You probably don’t know much about RFK Jr. _{(good for you, honestly),} so allow me to briefly summarize: this guy has spent years blaming things like vaccines, seed oils, and pesticides for what he calls a “chronic disease epidemic” in America.

He’s even pushing “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA), as if eating “clean” and taking (unregulated!!) supplements will fix our problems.

Even though RFK Jr. can’t single-handedly dictate policy, his role influences everything, from how quickly new treatments get approved to how federal health programs are run and funded.

Basically, he’ll play a huge role in determining whether the U.S. healthcare system is faster and more innovative or slower and more bureaucratic.

But here’s the inconvenient truth for RFK Jr.: We are richer and living longer than ever before, but modern life makes it absurdly easy to be unhealthy.

And instead of focusing on what actually matters, RFK Jr. and other grifters want you obsessing over the 1% of stuff that barely moves the needle on your health.

So let’s get into it.

Is there really a chronic disease epidemic?

Nearly 60% of Americans have some kind of chronic disease (heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity, hypertension, etc.).

So yeah, it’s a problem! RFK Jr. at least gets this part right.

But what he gets wildly wrong is the cause.

There isn't some vast conspiracy of "Big Food" and "Big Pharma" poisoning you with seed oils and fluoride.

The truth is far more mundane, and frankly, far more within your control _(yay!). But it’s also much more nuanced.

Charlatans want you to believe there’s some dark, insidious force pulling the strings. That toxins, Big Food, pesticides, or food additives are secretly making you sick. And conveniently, they have the solution — a supplement, a detox plan, a “biohack” they’re more than happy to sell you.

Just look at guys like Liver King, who turned out to be juiced to the gills with steroids but was saying “natural” things, like eating liver, got him into that shape.

🚨 Here’s a rapid-fire list of the biggest wellness grifts flooding your feed right now:

❌ Vaccines cause chronic disease → Nope. And not only do they undergo rigorous testing and save millions of lives ever year, but they reduce the risk of hospitalization (remember what happened in the early days of COVID?). Measles, for example, can wipe out your immune system memory — way worse than anything a vaccine could do to you.

❌ Seed oils are toxic → They’re literally fine, and some have even been consumed for thousands of years. Some may even have health benefits! The real issue? Eating too many damn calories, regardless of the source. While I’m on this subject: if seed oils were killing us, the Japanese (who eat plenty of them) shouldn’t have some of the longest life expectancy on Earth!

❌ Eat cane or table sugar, not high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) → it’s not about the kind of sugar but how much you eat (calories, again!)

❌ Food additives, preservatives, etc. are killing us → if this were the case, wouldn’t we see massive health issues in non-overweight populations? But instead? Life expectancy keeps rising. I'm all for more research, but let's not panic over trace amounts of chemicals while ignoring the elephant in the room (or, better said, on the scale _hehe).

Side note: if you’re wondering why Americans, on average, live shorter lives than Europeans — it’s mainly the drugs, car accidents, murder, and suicide.

❌ Fluoride in the water is hurting us and making us dumber → Fluoride actually helps prevent cavities, with no adverse effect on health or IQ, especially in developed countries.

❌ It’s the pesticides! → Pesticides also undergo rigorous testing by toxicologists, and we should thank them (especially fertilizers) for saving our society from starving (the natural state of humanity for 99% of history).

Not only that, but we have large datasets (like this one below of well-off men attending Yale and Amherst College from the 1850s) showing a huge spike in BMI as far back as 1900, but “these men weren't exposed to today's various "toxins", "processed foods", and high-fructose corn syrup wasn't even invented until 1957, when this series actually ends!”

So why do these myths persist?

Because our brains love a good villain. And wellness influencers are really good at telling a simple, emotional story that blames an insidious enemy instead of the boring truth.

We’re also in the midst of an epidemic of distrust and misinformation.

• People (especially Americans) are losing trust in institutions, not because there are better, alternative sources of truth now. There is simply much more competition for your attention. There are incentives everywhere to exaggerate, lie, and fool your homo sapien brain (which has the same biology as 300,000 years ago!) to buy a sketchy product. And when trust crumbles, people start looking for alternative “truths” (and con men rush to fill the void).
  

• We’re too good at marketing!

  • Fear sells. The more shocking the claim, the more engagement it gets. Here are two methods used against you (and you don’t even notice):
    

    1. The Appeal to Nature Fallacy – Marketers know that people associate something as "natural” to be good, and if something is "unnatural" (i.e., used in an industrial context), it must be bad. Hence how “processed” is used as a bad word with so little pushback. Like seed oils — people try and argue that, because they can be used as lubricants in machines, seed oils are harmful to consume, when what really matters is the end chemistry. Arsenic is natural and antibiotics are synthetic. Which one would you rather ingest??? This brings us to…
       

    2. False Analogy – Two things are compared in a way that doesn’t actually make sense. Just because a substance is used in one context (like machine lubrication) doesn’t mean it has the same effects or risks in another (like food consumption). Water is used in car batteries, but that doesn’t mean drinking water is dangerous.

And RFK Jr.? The dude rants about toxins while pumping himself full of mystery vitamins and supplements that are less regulated than food or medicine.

Dr. Mike Israetel summarized his hypocrisy well:

The Holy Trinity

So what are the real drivers of health? Thank god that we..

1. We know the answer

2. It’s pretty straightforward — simple, but not easy!

3. And it’s by and large in your control

The answer is painfully bland, yet incredibly difficult to implement in modern life.

These bad boys determine roughly > 90% of the average person’s health:

✅ Sleep — The #1 foundation of health. Bad sleep can lead to weight gain, stress, and poor decision-making. If you don’t get high quality sleep + enough sleep, the rest (diet and exercise) becomes nearly impossible to do well.

✅ Diet, specifically keeping it mostly to lean meats, plenty of veggies, fruits, whole grains, and healthy fats like avocados, Greek yogurt, and oils (yes, even the dreaded seed oils!). This is harder than EVER these days because food is the most delicious, cheap, and available it’s ever been. Your grandpa couldn’t just walk into a McDonald’s down the road and have the most delicious meal in human history, smashing 3000 calories all for just a few bucks.

✅ Exercise - just get some. Lifting weights and some good ole cardio.

I think people HATE this reality. You don’t need to listen to hundreds of hours of Andrew Huberman’s podcast to figure this out!

How great would it be to be able to blame and assign responsibility to some distant, overpowering force (like microplastics and black plastic, which could be bad, but are a small effect compared to diet/exercise).

In most people’s cases, the boring, true answer is that part of it is your responsibility, and part of it is not, i.e. your genetic food drive (when your brain tells you something is tasty and if you’re full - varies per person!).

Bonus points to hit would be:

🔹 Living in a place with decent air quality: Avoid extreme pollution (i.e. India’s air quality crisis)
🔹 Living in a walkable area
🔹 Get some sunlight/Vitamin D
🔹 The easy win — not microwaving plastic or styrofoam

The bottom line: many people obsessing over EMF/radiation from devices and tap water are ignoring the fact that they snack on calorie-dense, zero nutritional food all day, live in a car-dependent suburb, and get 5 hours of sleep a night.

The Health Risks The Grifters Never Talk About

Meanwhile, here’s a short list of some things that may actually be bad for you and you should mind, but get little to no trendy wellness scare:

⚠️ Vaping
⚠️ Too much sun exposure – it’s literally a thermonuclear bomb in the sky!!!
⚠️ Loneliness & social isolation

The Big Picture — Champagne Problems in the Age of Abundance

We're living longer and healthier lives than ever before. But instead of celebrating this unprecedented progress, we obsess over the tiny, often insignificant risks – the "champagne problems" of a society that has largely conquered the major threats to human survival.

RFK Jr. and the wellness grifters want you to fixate on this ~1-2% of optimization, because that’s how they sell books, supplements, and fear.

But none of these things (seed oils, tap water, pesticides) hold a candle to the real health drivers: sleep, diet, and exercise.

For Christ’s sake, guys, some people are even getting into replacing plastic gym floor mats.

What are we doing?!?!

Hope for the Future – Can Jim O’Neil Steer HHS in the Right Direction?

RFK Jr. is a disaster and may do some damage, but there’s still hope!

As always, focus on what’s in your control.

But #2: the HHS secretary deputy could bring real, long-lasting progress to Americans’ lives.

Jim O’Neil has been tapped to serve as deputy to RFK Jr. Here’s a brief summary:

🔹 Jim O’Neil has a track record of prioritizing efficiency & innovation in healthcare — he led Operation Warp Speed under Trump, which got us the life-saving COVID vaccines
🔹 He supports Right to Try – this means allowing patients facing terminal illness to have access to experimental treatments under clinical trials, which could save their lives
🔹 FDA reform advocate – Cutting red tape for faster, safer drug approvals and medical devices that could save lives
🔹 Acknowledges Medicare Advantage fraud – we lose billions to healthcare providers "upcoding,” meaning they submit incorrect billing codes to get more money from the government and insurance companies.

The Takeaway: Focus on the fundamentals — sleep, diet, exercise. Be skeptical of anyone selling you on fear. You have more control over your health than you think. And above all else, protect your hope.

Still curious? This banger on modern life’s abundance

Thanks for taking the Pack,

Zach

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Disclaimer: This is not financial advice or recommendation for any investment. The Content is for informational purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.