00:00Thank you, everybody.
00:09And thank you, Governor Morris.
00:11I'm very, very happy to be here at St. Joseph's, and I'm really happy to be here in West Virginia.
00:20I just want to say a few words about West Virginia, because West Virginia is a state
00:26that holds a special place in the hearts of every Kennedy.
00:32In the 1960 campaign, I was living in McLean, Virginia, but my parents disappeared into
00:39West Virginia for about six weeks, and we didn't see them.
00:45As well as all of my aunts, my uncle, President Kennedy, who was then in the Senate and was
00:50running for president, and the consensus wisdom around the country was that a Roman
00:59Catholic could not be elected President of the United States.
01:03Al Smith had run against President Roosevelt.
01:05He was a Catholic from New York, Catholic governor, very, very popular.
01:10And when people found out that he was Catholic, there was a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan,
01:16where crosses burned all across the country, and he lost the election catastrophically.
01:23And people just felt, Americans felt, and the pundits all felt that America would never
01:30elect a Catholic president.
01:32When my uncle decided to run for president, he knew that he had to win West Virginia.
01:38West Virginia had the lowest number of Catholics, less than 2% of the population was Catholic.
01:46And it was thought to be a place where there was a lot of anti-Catholic prejudice, and
01:52it voted overwhelmingly against Al Smith.
01:55It was critical to my uncle's campaign that he win this state and show the country that
02:00a Catholic could win the presidency.
02:04He came down to West Virginia, and his objective was to shake the hands of every person in
02:11West Virginia, and I think he came very close.
02:16And my parents came down, my uncles, my aunts, luckily we had a lot of Kennedys.
02:23And they all came down, and they spent time really getting to know the people in West
02:27Virginia, and understanding the issues in the state, the problems, and those things
02:33stayed with him throughout his presidency.
02:38And on election day, he won the state of West Virginia overwhelmingly.
02:44And during his presidency, he always believed that he would not be president if he had not
02:54won this state.
02:57And he never forgot that relationship and that bond that he had formed and that so many
03:02members of my family had formed with the people in this state, the affection and the warmth
03:09with which they were greeted and embraced.
03:13And it's something that now, 70 years later, everybody in our family has this very, very
03:20strong affection and bond to this state.
03:24And I've been lucky enough that I've been able to spend a lot of my career doing work
03:29in this state, in the mining country, and trying to end pollution and give people a
03:36chance to live healthier lives.
03:39I want to thank Governor Morrissey for his visionary leadership.
03:45I got to know Governor Morrissey early in the transition.
03:50We were both down in Palm Beach working on the transition in Mar-a-Lago, and we were
03:56both invited to stay during that time at Dr. Haas's house.
04:00And I got to know, I said to Governor Morrissey the first time I saw him, I said, you look
04:07like you ate Governor Morrissey.
04:13And there was a lot of talk about getting healthy again, and I'm very happy that he's
04:18invited me to be his personal trainer.
04:22And I am going to put him on a really rigorous regimen, and we're going to put him on a carnivore
04:35diet.
04:36We're going to make him do, raise your hand if you want Governor Morrissey to do a public
04:43weigh-in once a month.
04:49And then when he's lost 30 pounds, I'm going to come back to the state and do a celebration
04:55and a public weigh-in with him.
05:03You're welcome, Denise.
05:10We have a public health crisis in this country, and unfortunately West Virginia is leading
05:26the way.
05:27There's the highest obesity rate of any state in our country.
05:31This year you pulled ahead of Mississippi as the highest rate of chronic disease in
05:38the country.
05:40And so I'm very, very grateful to Governor Morrissey for his visionary leadership in
05:46getting West Virginia to lead the way in transitioning off of processed foods.
05:53When my uncle was president, 3% of Americans had chronic disease.
05:59We spent zero on chronic disease in this country.
06:03Zero.
06:04There were no, there was no medications for it.
06:07Today we spend, we spend $1.3 trillion on chronic disease every year.
06:15It's about 90% of our health care budget.
06:19And you know, for most of my life, the Republicans and Democrats have been fighting about a health
06:25care plan, about treatment, really a sick care plan, about how to treat all this illness.
06:33Should it be Obamacare, the affordable health plan?
06:39Should it be public-private partnership?
06:42Should it be a single payer?
06:44These are what the big battles that you read about on Capitol Hill.
06:48The real battle is that we're getting sicker and sicker every year.
06:52No matter, and it's really just a debate about who's going to pay the treatment.
06:58Nobody has been focused on how do we get ourselves less sick.
07:02And it's like moving deck chairs around on the Titanic.
07:06No matter what you do, our country is going to go bankrupt.
07:10It's now, you know, when I was a kid, diabetes rates in children were almost zero.
07:16Juvenile diabetes, a typical pediatrician would see one case of diabetes in his lifetime
07:23over a 40 or 50-year career.
07:26Today, one out of every three kids who walk through his office door is pre-diabetic or
07:32diabetic.
07:3338% of teens are now diabetic, 50% of adults.
07:39A few years ago, it's not a mystery about where this is coming from, 20 years ago there
07:45was no diabetes in China.
07:47Today, 50% of the population is diabetic.
07:52Why is that?
07:53They built 20,000 fast food joints in China and started selling American processed food.
08:00And this, it is costing us, we are now paying more just for diabetes, mitochondrial dysfunction,
08:08than we are for our military.
08:11And, you know, financially, it is bankrupting our country.
08:15We're now spending more to service our debt, and the biggest piece of that debt is coming
08:20from health care.
08:22We're now paying more to service it than we are for our military budget.
08:28Within about 10 years, if we continue on this trajectory, 50 cents out of every tax dollar
08:34that you pay to the federal government is going to go to servicing the debt.
08:40Within 15 years, 100%.
08:44It's not sustainable.
08:46It's existential.
08:48If you love our country, you've got to take care of yourselves.
08:52President Trump said that he wants to make America healthy again, but he wants to make
08:57it strong again.
08:59We cannot have a strong country if we have six citizens.
09:03President Trump says that he wants to restore the American dream.
09:08But a person who is healthy has a thousand dreams.
09:14A person who is sick has only one.
09:17And there is 60% of our country now that has only one dream, which is to get better.
09:25And we need to give them a pathway to doing that.
09:28And the pathway is through food.
09:30Food is medicine.
09:32It treats us in different ways.
09:35It treats our health.
09:37It treats our mental health.
09:38There was a recent study that showed that when they switched the diet in prisons, that
09:48violence went down to a whole food diet.
09:52That violence went down by about 70%.
09:55When they switched the diet in juvenile detention centers, the whole food diet, violence went
10:03down 100%.
10:05There's a scientist at Harvard now who is curing schizophrenia with a carnivore diet.
10:15So the loneliness, the dispossession, the crisis that we have in mental health, in suicide,
10:22in ADD, ADHD, all of these are linked, and particularly to the dyes.
10:28It's very clear the dyes that Governor Morrissey is banning.
10:35All of them are linked in very, very strong studies to ADHD and to cancers.
10:44So we're seeing an explosion of cancers in this country.
10:48We're seeing an explosion in infertility.
10:52Teenagers today have 50% of the sperm count and 50% of the testosterone of 68-year-old men.
11:02Girls are now reaching puberty six years earlier than they're supposed to.
11:07Between 10 and 13 years old.
11:10Other countries are not experiencing this.
11:12We've seen autism rates go from 1 in 10,000 when I was a kid, 1 in 10,000, 1 in every
11:2136 kids today, 1 in 22 boys in California.
11:27And the obesity rates have gone up to, as I said, 50% in adults, or 70% overall obesity
11:35or overweight, from 3%.
11:39In Japan, it's still 3%, because they're not eating these foods.
11:45They have nutrition programs in the foods where they have a nutritionist in every school
11:50who's in charge of the menu, and they eat healthy foods.
11:54So they don't have these illnesses.
11:56When I was a kid, we were the healthiest, most robust people in the world.
12:02And today, we're the sickest.
12:0460% of Americans, from 3% when my uncle was president, 60% today have chronic disease.
12:12And it's not happening in other countries.
12:14During COVID, we had 16% of the COVID deaths in this country.
12:21We only have 4.2% of the world's population.
12:25We literally did worse than any country in the world.
12:31And when you ask CDC why are Americans dying from COVID at higher rates than any place
12:36on earth, when we have all the money, they said, well, it's not our fault.
12:41It's because Americans are so sick.
12:44That is their fault.
12:47And we're going to change that.
12:49If they said that, according to CDC, the average American who died from COVID had 3.8 chronic
13:05diseases.
13:06So they had diabetes, they had obesity, and maybe asthma, and one other thing.
13:13And it was the chronic disease, really, that was killing them.
13:16Healthy kids were not dying.
13:18Healthy Americans were not dying of COVID.
13:21It was a disease that attacked the sick, and that's true with all infectious diseases.
13:27If we can make ourselves, the biggest thing that we can do for pandemic preparedness is
13:32to make ourselves healthy again.
13:35We're now, 74% of American kids cannot qualify for military service because of chronic disease.
13:45This is affecting our national security.
13:48It's destroying our economy.
13:50It is existential for this country.
13:54And we need to change it.
13:55And I am so happy that you have a visionary governor in this state, and that West Virginia
14:01is now leading the way.
14:03And I, you know, I want to commend Governor Morrisey, not only for his vision, but for
14:15his courage, because it's very, very hard, and for these legislatures who are pushing
14:20this bill, all of them are getting calls every day from the big soda companies, the sugar
14:27soda and the fake food companies.
14:30We're not eating food, we're eating food like substances.
14:34And I'll tell you what happened in the, I was involved in the tobacco litigation back
14:41in the late 1980s.
14:44And the tobacco companies were at that time the cash richest companies in the world.
14:50But they saw the lighting, the writing on the wall, they saw that the consumer base
14:53was turning against them.
14:55People were stopping smoking, and that they were being prosecuted and sued successfully.
15:02They settled those lawsuits, but they also started shifting their resources to diversify
15:10their companies.
15:12And they went out and they bought the food companies.
15:15So by 1994, the two biggest food companies in the world were RJ Reynolds and Philip Morris,
15:22tobacco companies.
15:24They took about 10,000 scientists who were all engaged in various ways to make tobacco
15:30more addictive, and they put them to work making food addictive, inventing ingredients
15:36in the laboratory that would make it do things to food.
15:41For example, they found out that food that you fill up, you have your brain tells you
15:50your stomach is filled, in part by counting the number of times you chew.
15:56So they started adding softeners to our food so that you wouldn't chew so much.
16:01So you'd have a sense that you're unsatisfied, that you're insatiable, that you're never
16:10full, so that you keep pouring it down your mouth.
16:15That's just one of the many things they did.
16:16They added sodium and sugar.
16:18Sugar is as addictive as crack, and it's almost as bad for you.
16:24It kills you just as surely, it just kills you a little slower.
16:28It feeds tumors, it destroys your body, it destroys your brain.
16:33And they added more and more sugar to make us addicted to their products.
16:38And these companies are now, just like the tobacco companies were, are flooding into
16:44the offices of your state leaders and legislators and the governor.
16:48And they're telling him he's making a big mistake.
16:51They're telling him that they're going to stop writing checks, that they're going to
16:54run people against them, that they're going to destroy their political careers.
16:59And Governor Morrisey was telling me that he met with the soda companies this week,
17:05and they said to him, you need to be educated about this.
17:09And they said, you know, Food Stamps is not a nutrition program.
17:14He came in with his Diet Coke, and he said, is there anything nutritious in here?
17:19And they were like, no, of course not.
17:22But Food Stamps is not a nutrition program.
17:25And he said, it's called SNAP, Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Program.
17:30It's supposed to be nutrition.
17:33It's not supposed to be food-like substances that are actually poisoning us.
17:39But it takes a lot of courage to stand up to these companies the same way that it did
17:44to stand up to big tobacco.
17:46But these men and women, your leaders, Governor Morrisey, is standing up for you.
17:53And we all need to stand up for ourselves and take care of ourselves.
17:58It's an act of patriotism.
18:01If you love this country, you need to start taking care of yourselves.
18:05And I want to thank, I also say this, that food companies all came and met with me two
18:12weeks ago.
18:14And they're scared of me, but they're more scared of Governor Morrisey.
18:21Because what they said, and the reason they said, well, tell us what you want, we're going
18:25to do it.
18:26And they said, but stop these governors from passing these laws.
18:32Because we don't want a patchwork where West Virginia and California are banning food dyes.
18:38And we have to make special products for those states.
18:41So they're terrified of this, of what you're doing.
18:44And what I, the message I want to give to the country today and to all the other governors
18:49is get in line behind Governor Morrisey and apply for a waiver to my agency and we're
18:55going to give it to you.
18:57That's the way we're going to win this.
19:08I want to thank all of you.
19:10I want to thank the Maha Moms who got me into this office.
19:15And President Trump was giving me free reign to do anything I need to do to make America
19:22healthy again.
19:24And I particularly want to thank Governor Morrisey and these
19:34legislators for their courage, for their vision, for their willingness to stand up to the most
19:40powerful industries in the world, to stand up for the people of West Virginia and set
19:46an example, a shining example of the rest of the country.
19:50Thank you all very much.
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