Courtney Swan
Appearances
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
We do. We need somebody to go against the status quo, because right now what we're doing is clearly not working. And the people that are in there for right now, for whatever reason, whether they just don't think that way or they don't feel like they're allowed to, they're just not asking questions anymore.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
They just have been trained to think like, OK, we just know it's X, Y and Z. And there's this thinking, I think, in the medical system that we just we've we've figured everything out. We have it all figured out. We're fine. We can just throw a pill at something. We can have a surgery.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
But in the medical system, we need a whole uphaul upheaval because we need to go back to prevention and we need to go back to what is the root cause of this? What is causing this in the first place? We shouldn't be thinking, OK, well, now that we have this, let's just like throw this pill up there or let's put all of our money in our research into now you have the cancer. What do we do?
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Why aren't we putting all of our research into can we prevent this in the first place? If there's chemicals that we're spraying on our food, can we stop doing that so that we don't get the cancer in the first place? And there doesn't seem to be a lot of that happening in our Senate right now and in our health care system. And so there is a lot of pushback from senators. You're right.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
I think there's like this old mentality and people are scared maybe of what's going to come out of it, of the truth. Maybe they are scared of losing money, losing funding from big pharma companies.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
I mean, it's it's interesting and it'll be really I'm concerned because I feel like if Bobby doesn't get in there, I'm concerned that we're losing our opportunity to have somebody new in there that's going against the grain and going to actually bring up these questions.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
And I said this earlier that I have been following Bobby's work for about 10 years now. I love him. He's an environmental environmental lawyer. He also was on the litigation team against Monsanto. It was a guy that was spraying on. Yes, exactly. The groundskeeper. And he got non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. And Bobby was very famously on that litigation team.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
That is true. Thank God. Is what I feel. Do you feel that way? Yeah, I do. I just worry that if we have somebody that gets in there, if Bobby doesn't get confirmed, that maybe it's just from the old school thinking. And then from the top down, we don't get a lot of change. But look, at the end of the day, I mean, I've been doing this work for publicly for 14 years now.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
I've been talking about this in my inner circles for like 18 years. I'm so happy because I've never, I've never seen it talked about it on a stage like this before. It's getting national attention. I mean, whether or not it's like good or bad press, it's still, it's all over the, you know, Washington Post, New York Times. It's on our political stage now. We have our president saying this.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
I mean, Trump literally said a couple months ago that he wants to get to the root of the epidemic that we're having right now of chronic disease. So I'm grateful that the conversation has at least been started and more and more people are starting to wake up and ask questions because I mean, if we can't, If we can't change from the top up, we can absolutely do it from the bottom. Yeah.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
So it was a gradual waking up for me until it all just kind of hit me one day, I feel like, because I was very fortunate growing up. My mom has always been really healthy. I was the kid that my mom was buying the off brand natural cereals like we were shopping in a grocery store before we even had Whole Foods. But then Whole Foods came in and bought them out.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
And it was this really small little natural food store. And I remember I would go to friends houses and just binge on their like Dunkaroos and Doritos and all the stuff that like I couldn't have. And at the time, I was pretty resentful to my mom about it. My mom still she loves to give me every time I see her now.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
She's like, remember when you used to have tantrums every night because your friends were getting Burger King for dinner and I wouldn't let you have it because my mom was making. I mean, I look back and like it's just I'm horrified that I was so upset about it because my mom was making these gourmet meals from scratch.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
And this is something that I'm incredibly passionate about that we can talk more about. The glyphosate thing is a really big issue. So watching that confirmation today and seeing these senators just rip into him and knowing that this man... is taking bullets right now for the American people because he genuinely cares. He also said this. He said, I don't need to be here. I have a happy life.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
I mean, I would literally sit on the counter and she would be cranking out homemade pasta and baking her own bread, which is my dream now. I wish I could go move in with her now, honestly.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Literally. So she was really on it. And very, very early on. I mean, my mom told me in 2006. It's crazy that I remember the date, but I remember the year because she cut out a newspaper article and physically mailed it to me at my college dorm. And it was an article about trans fats. And she said, watch out for hydrogenated oils because trans fats are really bad.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Well, then we know now, obviously, that trans fats are really bad for us. And they ultimately were pulled from our food supply in 2006. when was that? 16, somewhere around there, where food companies were finally, they were legally required to take them out. But this is how far back my mom was in on all this. So I had my mom kind of like in my ear showing me stuff here and there.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
But at the time I was kind of, you know, I was like 21, like, oh yeah, whatever mom kind of mentality, you know, but it was interesting. I was still kind of taking it in. I took a nutrition class. My last class in my undergrad was And it really sparked an interest for me that I had never experienced before nutrition. I have a very inquisitive mind and I love to know how things work.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
And learning about how food affected our bodies and how important nutrition was and when I really started to make the connections of what I was putting in my body and how food is literally code for our DNA, right? I just was fascinated by all of that. And then fast forward to when I started finding the works of people like Michael Pollan and Dr. Mark Hyman.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
I was really upset to learn that what I was discovering about food and how food can be used as medicine wasn't actually being applied for the general public. In fact, it was quite the opposite. And I started learning about things like, I mean, the FDA has admitted that they don't have the full manpower
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
to man all of the stuff that's coming onto our into our food supply and going onto our shelves they just don't have the manpower the funding they just admitted this to bernie sanders in a hearing like two months ago there's this misconception that if something is on the shelf that it's been safe and vetted for and that it's healthy and that it's considered to be food i don't consider these old processed hyper processed food like products to be food
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
So there was a large awakening for me there. I felt a moral obligation to tell people because this was largely not being discussed. I mean, when I was starting to wake up to all of this, I started Real Foodology in 2011. And there were circles, little circles of people talking about it and, you know, natural food stores popping up and stuff like that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
But it wasn't being talked about on a stage like it is now. So I just felt this moral obligation to let people know, like, hey, guys, this is how we navigate a broken food system and this is how we can change it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
I have a happy family. I'm not getting anything out of this. He's like, it's not like I'm getting a significant amount of money in this position. He's doing this because he cares, because he thinks that we need a reform in our healthcare system. And so seeing this pushback, and then you look...
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
I mean, I feel like it's the obvious offenders, like the cereal, just anything that's ultra processed. That's when I... So I started vigilantly reading food labels. And I was horrified because before then I had never even looked at them. In fact, when I was in college, I'm so embarrassed to admit this now, but I was so uneducated.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
So I had gained a bunch of weight when I was in college because I went from...
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
eating these amazing meals at home to eating fast food and partying and drinking and so I gained a bunch of weight and I was trying to lose the weight and I was eating lean cuisines and slim fast bars and at the time we were being told in magazines I'm opening and ads on the tv that this is what you eat to be healthy and so when I started reading those ingredient labels I was horrified by what I was seeing because you look at that I mean there's 40 plus ingredients on that and it
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
It shouldn't be that many ingredients. And more than half of them, you look at it and you're like, I don't even know where I would buy this in the grocery store. Where would I buy BHT in the grocery store? You don't. You get it from a factory.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
And then it's being put in your food so that it can be preserved and so that it can sit on that shelf for a lot longer so those companies can make more money. It doesn't have to do with your health whatsoever. It's all about the profits for the food companies. So I would say, yeah, the largest offenders are all these ultra-processed, hyper-processed foods that don't resemble food anymore.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
I have been going hard on this online today, but if you look at all the senators that are pushing back on him and they're making millions of dollars off of pharmaceutical companies and that's the whole reason they're going after him because they're all scared that it's going to be exposed.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Is it the plastic list?
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Yeah.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
This is why I don't understand the resistance to all of this, because there, there is a large resistance to it and people have made this largely political. And I don't understand how we can't just all agree that, We have an antiquated system happening right now. We largely didn't understand the implications of plastic on our bodies 10, 15 years ago.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
You know, thank God for the work of Dr. Shanna Swan, who I'm sure you're aware of, who wrote The Countdown. And she talks all about how phthalates are affecting our bodies, how it's affecting our fertility, men's testosterone levels, sperm counts, like... We largely didn't know that this was really an issue until more recently. And now we know. That's the thing is we have the science.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
We have the data out there. But now we need to understand where we're getting all this exposure from. And there's the obvious low-hanging fruits like stop buying the plastic water bottles, right? But the meat, I mean, I was at the grocery store the other day. I can't even find meat at my local grocery store that's not wrapped in plastic. And that was the first thing I was thinking.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
I didn't even think about them physically eating the plastic. Although, horrifyingly enough, I've heard in factory farming settings that they will take expired bread from grocery stores still in the plastic wrap and just feed it to them. Candy bars in the wrappers.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Now, I don't think that that's allowed in the grass-fed organic realm, but in the factory farming realm, I've seen a lot of reports of that happening. So there's largely a lot of stuff happening right now in our food system that needs to be addressed, that for whatever reason we're not talking about, we're not looking into it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
And there's all this conversation politically right now about how we're wasting so much of our government funding going to these weird freaking freakish studies that no one even wants to have studies on anyways. Why are we not putting our money towards this? This is something that sustains our life. We eat three meals a day. This is what we need to live on this planet, and we're largely...
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Thank you so much for having me.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
poisoning ourselves in so many different directions. So why are we not looking at that?
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Yes. I've
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
I mean, I can take this two different directions. I feel like why, well, first of all, we know these foods are addictive, right? So would we, I mean, we're, there's this weird thing happening right now where we are encouraging people with needles and stuff. That's a whole different argument.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
What I was going to say is why would we want to encourage drug addicts instead of give them, get them the education, let them know that this is actually doing to their body? Because I think largely, I don't think people really understand that. I think people are starting to kind of understand like, oh, you know, if I drink a bunch of sodas, it's probably not the best for me.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
But I don't think they literally understand like this is the matter of you between you getting diabetes and like having your leg chopped off, like the difference between that or the difference between getting a rampant cancer and dying at a young age. I don't think that we're truly – as a population understanding the implications of these food products.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
I think people think of it kind of in this way of like, oh, I'm being bad today, but it's fine. I also don't think people understand how much they're consuming these products now. You look at the standard American diet, and if people are not reading ingredient labels... They're eating upwards of, I don't even know how many additives and chemicals, 50 plus a day probably.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
We haven't studied what all those different additives and chemicals are doing in conjunction together in the human body. So to answer your question, I think there's largely an education piece that needs to happen here where people really understand what's happening so they can demand better for themselves. Because I think at the end of the day, everybody wants to be healthy.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Nobody wants to feel sick. I think we also have a large problem where part of our population doesn't really feel well. A large portion of our population is metabolically unwell, and they don't know what it feels like to actually really feel well and healthy. So how can we get that education out to people that it's not hitting yet?
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Because it's very much hit our world, but it's not largely hit the American population. So how can we get that education out there and then get them to actually be demanding better for their foods? And then also... Real food tastes good. There's this weird notion out there that if you're eating healthy, you're eating rice cakes and boiled chicken with no seasoning and broccoli that's bland.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
I have a rule in my house. If it doesn't taste good, I don't eat it. Like I'm not choking down things just for the health of it. Eating real fresh food. I think you probably have the joy of knowing what it's like to go to a farmer's market here in California and get really fresh food and make a meal from that at home. Nothing tastes better than that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
And there's this notion that if we're going to take away people's ultra processed foods that we're taking away, you know, delicious, yummy tasting foods. I don't think any of those foods taste good. I tried Reese's Pieces last year. They used to be my favorite candy when I was younger. I spit them out. I thought they tasted absolutely disgusting.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
So I think there needs to be this level of education around all of that and maybe slowly introducing people to healthier foods. Like how can we encourage them to want to do this for themselves and empower them to do that? Because people are largely addicted is essentially what I'm saying. And they don't know what it's like to eat real food and what it really tastes like.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Yeah.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
It was honestly uncomfortable to watch. Yeah. It was hard, too. I don't know.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Well, isn't it crazy that we don't teach children this? They should be learning this in kindergarten. I mean, I remember, did you ever watch that show Jamie Oliver when he went into our school system and he tried to clean up the food system?
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
They didn't even know what they were. Yeah. I feel like we have our priorities so backwards. Like this should be the first thing that we're teaching kids. Put a community garden in all of those schools and have them gardening when they're in kindergarten or elementary school. Help them make the connection with the foods that they're putting in their bodies.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
There is literally nothing more important. Because without your health, you have nothing. You're not going to be here anymore without your health. You also don't or you're not going to have energy to show up for your life. Your body is not going to be functioning if you don't have your health. So why is this not our first priority and something that we teach kids at a young age?
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
And then, yeah, I mean, I see these photos circulating all over like Twitter and Instagram. All the schools across the globe, like Italy, Japan, these kids are getting real food, meals. And then you look at what our kids are getting, and it's all white foods. It's like fried chicken tenders and mashed potatoes and like maybe a couple green peas that the kids are probably throwing away anyways.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Yeah.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
I heard this today on the Senate hearing, actually, where one of the senators said, if you go and you look at the trash cans of all these schools, they're largely throwing away all this food because it's all ultra processed garbage that they don't want to eat anyways. And then they're just going and buying snacks. And that's what they're eating for their meals.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
They're buying the lays and the sodas. And and that's what they're eating because they don't even want to eat the food that we're giving them. It's like prison food.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Well, first and foremost, we have to understand, at least right now, that our government is largely not taking care of this. So we have to be our own advocates. We have to be the CEOs of our own health. we have to be in control of what we can control. There's obviously a lot that we can't control. And if we're eating out, you know, it's fine.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Like I still eat out like a normal person and I try not to worry about it. But in your home, you completely control the groceries that come into your home. So I would say first and foremost, do your due diligence.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
If you live in a place where you have access to a farmer's market or, I mean, my mom lives in San Antonio and she has a farmer that she drives, she drives like 30 minutes to meet a guy that comes into town to bring all of his meat in, a rancher. And so find things like that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
There's so many communities now that have CSA boxes and farmer's markets or ways that you can contact your farmers and figure out how you can actually get food from the source. So I would say first and foremost, like, yes, absolutely. Just take it in your own hands.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
So I've kind of been going back and forth on this all day. I'm not really entirely sure. I think I have a lot of faith that he is going to get in there because I ultimately believe that the light outshines the dark. And I think we're dealing with a lot of darkness right now with the pharmaceutical companies that are that have overpowered the conversation in the media for a very long time.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
If you have a kid and you're worried about what your kid is eating in school, start a group with your mom friends and start raising hell because I know there's a lot... I get messages almost every single day from moms in my messages saying, I am horrified by what my kid is being fed in school. How do we fix this? Start creating little coalitions with your mom friends and demand change.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
I mean, we said this earlier. The senators are saying that if they hear enough about a problem and they realize that this is what people want, they are going to be forced to change or they will be voted out. They do listen to their people. They just don't think that people care because nobody is really raising alarm about it until recently. So get involved in the places that you can.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
If you're a nurse, start a coalition and try to change the food system in the hospital. The hospitals are horrifying. I mean, people go there because they're sick, wounded, healing, and then they're getting these ultra-processed fake foods loaded with sugar, loaded with preservatives. So there's a lot that we can do.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
And then I would say on a political level, start calling your senators, start emailing them, calling them. They listen to us. And the more that we raise alarm about this, the more they're going to realize that this is something that people actually really care about.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Yes, I was getting it from personal level and then also online. I will say largely my community was actually pretty on board because I – it's funny that I sit here today and I'm considered to be somewhat political now because I spoke in front of the Senate and I've really aligned myself with Bobby. But largely before that, I completely stayed out of the conversations.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
I never really wanted to have anything to do with politics. And in fact, I had my own kind of reckoning and come to Jesus moment because, I mean, I lived in L.A. for the last decade. I've been a voting Democrat my whole adult life. I mean, I voted for Obama. I voted for Biden the last election. So... I just I believe so much in this cause.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
And I think enough people are waking up to it. I've also seen Twitter just absolutely exploding today with people just making all the connections with, oh, this senator was going hard after him because look at all these payments that they've been getting from X, Y, and Z pharmaceutical companies. So I think
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
And I also was listening very intently to what Bobby was saying. And I was also finding that to be true. And I'm sorry that I'm not even sorry, but this is going to come across political. But this is what I believe to be true. Bobby very eloquently stated that. he felt like the party left him. He said, I don't recognize this party anymore.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
They're aligning themselves with war and they're aligning themselves with the corporations. And he's like, I feel like I haven't changed. And that's exactly my stance. None of my opinions have changed since I was voting for a Democrat. I'm anti-war. I'm anti-Big Pharma. I'm anti-large corporations meddling with us. And it feels as though the parties have shifted.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
And I'm not even taking a full stance on the right either, to be quite honest. I really consider myself to be living in the middle.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
But the way that I see this is that it's so funny because I was literally having a conversation with girlfriends about this today because they're seeing all these people online right now being like they agree with everything that Bobby says, but they're so scared to align themselves. So they'll say they were saying things online. There's this trend right now, people being like.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
well, I don't eat seed oils, but not in like the RFK Jr. way. And I was laughing about it because I'm like, why are we so scared to step outside of party lines? Why can't we just say, hi, I'm a human individual that cares about individual things. I'm pro-choice. I care a lot about that. I also care a lot about the state of the health of this country right now.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
And quite frankly, with the infertility rates and the way that they're going right now, we're not going to have to worry about abortion in 20 years if we don't fix this. In my opinion, this is the largest issue that we're dealing with right now. We're quite literally extincting ourselves. And if we don't figure it out and address it, we're not going to be here anymore to vote anyway.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
So in my opinion, this is not about politics. And I hate that everybody's making this about politics. And I understand why they are. But you have to zoom out and start asking questions. why when Bobby Kennedy reached out to Kamala, she completely shut him down, didn't want to have a conversation about it, didn't want to ask any questions about the American health of the people.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
That to me right there was a full stop and made me think, huh, OK, so the Democratic Party, as at least right now, they don't care about the health of the American people. And that's the way I took it. And again, I'm sitting here as someone who considers myself moderate.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
People are definitely waking up to it, and I'm hoping that these senators are feeling the pressure. The last couple days I've been urging everyone that is in my community to call their senators and put pressure on them to vote him in.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
I'm not like a Trump sympathizer or saying like I love everything that he does, but I largely love the way that this is going right now. And him saying that he wants to get to the root
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
And I've gotten several messages back from people saying, oh, my God, they just said that their phone lines have been ringing off the hook all day and that this is all people are calling in about right now. People really care about this.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Oh yeah.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Exactly. If there was a weird swap and all of a sudden the Democrats are the one that are that are fighting for Maha. Great. Then I guess I'm a Democrat. Like I have no alliance to any political party. I just have alliance to my core beliefs and what I think are most important. That's it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
And I just don't like that we have turned this now because now what you're seeing, like, for example, when we saw in that Senate hearing today, Bobby is sitting there in front of them going, can we please, can we please put our side, our political agendas here? This is about our children. This is about the future of this country. This is about addressing the chronic diseases.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Oh, yeah. Just from the way that the senators were going after him, it just, I don't know, it kind of broke my heart because I've been following his work for probably about 10 years now.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
This is not about if you're left or you're right, because look, I'm sorry, if you're going to, if you get cancer, it doesn't matter if you're Democrat or Republican. So how can we not all come together on this and all decide? Cause we're,
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
We could be so much stronger and smarter and figure out things so much faster if we just stopped infighting about the political, well, you believe in this and we believe in that. It's like, okay, well, can we at least agree on this one thing and address that?
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Same as you mentioned earlier, I went to Capitol Hill to the Senate for a nutrition roundtable that was hosted by Senator Ron Johnson, who was there today back in September.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
A second opinion on nutrition. It was a round table hosted by Senator Ron Johnson. Got it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Publicly or do you mean like in circles?
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
I mean, that was a really surreal experience. It felt like everything I had been working hard for the last like 14 years was finally starting to get recognized. And, you know, let me say to the first seven years, I think I was doing real foodology. I didn't I wasn't making a dime. This was not it was in fact, it's I laugh about it now because it was never my intention to ever become a career.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Like I just was passionate about it. And then all of a sudden was like, oh, I'm putting a lot of time and effort into this. Like, how can I actually make this a job? So it was surreal because it felt like all of the work that I've been doing for the last 14 years was finally starting to get recognition. And it's not about me. It's just the message was getting recognition.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
And actually, people were paying attention to it. It was so validating to hear our U.S. senator sit there on a public stage and say, why are we not asking these questions? Why are we not addressing this? Why? Why does Japan have a 3% obesity rate? And then we have a 74% obesity rate in American adults and then 50% in our children. So it was, it was a surreal.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
And then I got out of it and yeah, I mean the videos went viral, which was amazing because I want people to understand what's happening with Monsanto and glyphosate. My phone was getting blown up. It was funny. I've had so many friends because, you know, I've been doing this for so long that, like I said, this wasn't even always my career. I just was in my circles.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
I was kind of known as the like a little bit like crazy about nutrition kind of thing. Like people would always make fun of me for it where they just be like, oh, my God, Courtney's crazy. drinking your almond milk and like, you know, buying organic food and lecturing us about all of it or whatever.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
And I was getting a lot of texts from people being like, wow, you have like stuck with this for a really long time and you're finally getting your message out there. And it's really cool to see. So it was, it was awesome.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Yeah, it's awesome. We have a, we have a group chat going where we, we keep each other up to date on, on everything, which is really fun and cool. And we all kind of motivate each other and it's awesome. Yeah. So Will was a friend of mine. Max was a friend of mine. I met some amazing people. Um, I had the pleasure of meeting, uh, Michaela Peterson and Jordan Peterson, which was surreal.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
I think Jordan is amazing. Um, and I love what Michaela is doing. Um, yeah, it was, it's cool. Cause then now it feels like, it's so funny because I feel like this work I've been doing alone for so long, like I've known people in the space, right? Like I've had a lot of friends in the space just from living in LA and doing podcasts and stuff like that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
It's absolutely surreal.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
But it, it largely felt like I was doing this kind of alone for a long time, just because a lot of the work we do is like, you know, videos and trying to get the word out and educating people in the, or my podcast is largely alone.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
So it's cool to feel like you have this kind of tight knit group now that we're all, we all have the same goals in mind and we're all helping each other and propping each other up. And it's, Cool. It's fun.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
So my specific presentation, my speech was all about glyphosate. This is something I'm incredibly passionate about, about the way that we're farming right now, big ag and these big agrochemical companies that own the majority of our food system right now, specifically Bayer. Bayer bought Monsanto back in 2018, and Monsanto is largely responsible for GMOs that have been put into our food system.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
That one's really funny. And it's interesting because we've gotten a little bit of pushback on that even too. And I'll explain all the ins and outs of that. Red 3 was just the lowest hanging fruit. It's been banned.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
It was Red 3. Okay, got it. Red 3. So there's been a lot of pushback from people saying, well, Red 40 is so much worse. It's so much more ubiquitous. It's in many more foods. Yes, all of that is true. Red three was just a very easy, low hanging fruit. They could immediately be like, OK, we know this. We've already banned this.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
They banned this 30 years ago in cosmetics because there's a link to cancer. Why it ever ended up in our food, I don't know. But this is a perfect example of the competence, if you want to say, of what's happening with our food policies right now. And so and I think it largely was passed through because Bernie Sanders had a Senate hearing with the FDA, and they sat down in front of him.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
I mean, he was grilling them. It was honestly amazing to watch.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
He showed up really strong, and it was really awesome, and it made me so happy. And they admitted. They said, we don't have the funding. We don't have the manpower. They admitted that we are largely behind in our research compared to other countries like the EU. And what I want to know is, well, why can't we just look at the research the EU has done?
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
I mean, the EU, you have to there's a warning label on foods that contain red for you or any of these dyes if they're in the UK and places like Sweden. So I think there's just a low hanging fruit. That was an easy one for them to just be like, OK, we're going to we're going to ban that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
I mean, it should give everyone listening hope because it showed us that if we put enough pressure on them, that we can start getting this stuff recognized and actually addressed. So the hope is, is that now that they've done red three, that they're going to start looking at the other ones like red 40, yellow five, all these other dyes. I mean, those are also easy anyways.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
They serve no nutritional value whatsoever. They're simply there to make the foods look more appetizing. And they've admitted that they know that they're more addictive for kids because the kids love the bright colors. So that's an easy one. I think the harder ones are going to be the glyphosate and some of these preservatives and additives.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
And they also own something called Roundup, which is also known as glyphosate, which is an herbicide that is widely being sprayed on our food system right now. Back in 2017, 16, they estimated that we were spraying 287 million pounds of glyphosate a year on our farmland. And it's projected that it's much higher than that now. So I presented to the Senate. I was incredibly concerned about this.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
So I understand the criticisms because I'm seeing a lot of people saying, OK, well, even if you take out these dyes, it's still not great food for you. I totally agree with that. But I see it. I see a couple different angles here. One, I see it as like you said, I think it's great momentum. I think it also gets the message out there to people and it starts helping people connect to. Wait a second.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Our FDA has allowed this dye that we know has caused cancer. It's linked to cancer, and it's been banned in cosmetics for the last 30 years, and they've allowed this dye in our food. What else are they allowing into our food? So it's sparking these questions in people. And also, look, we're in this problem in the first place because we're not making – food anymore.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
We're making food like products that have all these additives and have these dyes. If we can start stripping all of that, I'm not inherently, I'm not against buying things in packages, but I buy things that are made with three, four ingredients that are made with real whole food ingredients. So how can we get to a place where
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
We can strip all of those packaged foods of all the things that we shouldn't even be eating there in the first place. So I just see this as the first step to hopefully many where we start questioning all this and going, oh, OK, so the dyes are not great. OK, well, what about the preservatives that are making the food not mold and sit on the shelf for three years without molding?
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Maybe, you know, we should look at that. And I think it's just going to I think it's stepping stones, right? It's baby steps. We can't there's no way we're not going to sit
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
I think I've heard of that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
We're seeing rates of cancer go through the roof. And then you look at what's happening in the courts right now with Monsanto Bayer. They're getting destroyed. They've paid over $2 billion to people that have gotten non-Hodgkin's lymphoma from using glyphosate, from using their products.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
It's nuts. And then you want to know how insidious this is and full circle it is? So these farmers are spraying glyphosate, which is owned by Bayer, on their farmlands. And then when they get cancer from it, they're given chemo drugs that are also created by the same company, Bayer.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
It's also wild because it sounds conspiratorial. I woke up to this around during COVID too, where I was learning about if they were doing trials on these vaccines and they would have like an adverse event, then they would just push that person out of the trials. And then they just wouldn't even count it as part of their data is what I was hearing.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
And largely that's all pretty much everything that was considered conspiracy during COVID has all largely been proven as fact now. There's also a really interesting statistic that I think – You know, everyone holds science on this pedestal, right? Of like, it's almost become this like cult and this religion.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Well, we forget that on average, it takes about 17 years for the science to catch up to what we already logically know to be true. So when everybody's saying, oh, we need the data, we need the science to back it up. Well, sometimes we just don't have it yet because we haven't finished studying it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Or, you know, there's things that we logically know to be true and it takes 17 years for it to catch up to it. So we're not always going to have data right away, but I don't understand how we've gotten so far from this notion of common sense that now we need a study just to prove things that we oftentimes already know intuitively are as common sense. And look, I'm a huge proponent for science.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
I'm not sitting here bashing science. We have to understand what the process is. And when you start learning things and you start diving into really complex things, for example, like how the human body works, you realize that largely we don't really actually know that much. And we're learning things all the time. And that's cool. And that's a beautiful thing.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
And the beautiful thing about science is you learn one thing and then maybe 15 years later you learn, oh, we were actually not entirely correct about that. And we need to, you know, rewrite that and correct that. And so science is ever changing as we learn new things and we're constantly learning new things. And I think we forget that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Yeah. So I'm the host of the Real Foodology podcast. I've been doing that for in September, it'll be five years. I'm so grateful for that. That's a large portion of my work because it's how I'm actually able to sit down. And I mean, the conversations like this are so important because it's hard to get everything you need to get out in a 60 second video on Instagram, you know?
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Dwayne Lee Johnson. Yes. So that was a really famous case because I believe he was the first one that put it on the map. He set the precedence for the rest of it. And Bobby was a part of that litigation team. And so I've been following his work for a long time.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
And so I love to sit down and talk about all the ins and outs and the nuances of everything so people can really understand where you're coming from and also understand what you're talking about. Um, Instagram is also a place where I, I mean, I just have fun.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
I love to, it's a great place to get information out to people, to get people involved, to get people excited about the movement, get them calling their senators. So it's largely what I'm doing. And I'm also working on a book right now. I'm currently writing my book proposal right now.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say this, but I'll say it anyways. It's not really giving anything away, but essentially I'm, I'm largely talking about what I do every day on my Instagram, but, but telling the full picture. So I want people to understand what happened, how we got to this place, what the policies look like now versus like how we need to shift.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
And also just knowing all of this and what we need to change, how can you get involved and actually help be a part of the change and just how you can navigate all of this.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Yeah, exactly. And just the actual history of, you know, big tobacco buying big food in 1985 and what happened with Monsanto, just kind of telling the whole, painting the whole picture of how we got to this place with our food system.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
And I can see how much he cares about the American people and his whole message and what he's been trying to get out to people is these corporations are poisoning us and our government. And we have policies in place that are allowing these corporations to get away with it. And he's just sitting up here now in front of the American people saying, I want to change this.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Yeah, it's exciting. It's an exciting time. It's cool. I don't know how this will land for people, but I found this super interesting. For the first time, the White House press secretary is opening up their doors to podcasters and content creators. I saw that. I thought it was amazing. I saw all these comments of people saying, oh, great.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Now, I don't know, everybody's saying that it's just going to make the information worse. But in my opinion, I'm like, we've already been... We've been lied to so much by our media companies. I'm shocked that anyone even believes them anymore. And so we're kind of forced to now have other people tell the truth of what actually is happening. So I thought it was cool and I thought it was a big win.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Yeah, for sure. Well, and you have to think about it, too. Like a lot of these people that, I mean, let's just say CNN for the sake of it. I'm not pinpointing them because they're all doing this. But, you know, they're all getting their funding from Big Pharma. They're largely getting their funding. All these large media companies are getting a lot of funding from Big Pharma. Yeah.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
of course they're not going to be able to tell the full truth. So we need to get other people in there that are unbiased, that are not getting paid by any company to say anything other than just simply what the facts are and what the truth is.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
No, I didn't see this.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Who was it?
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Of course it was.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
We need to get these corporations out of the way so that we can actually have a true gold standard for real science, not science that's being paid for by these companies that have vested interest. And also so that we can get their vested interest out and stop poisoning our Americans. Because right now we're more concerned about profit than we are about the health of our human population.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
And then I'm sure everyone listening has seen this, but the whole compilation of the brought to you by Pfizer, brought to you by Pfizer.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Oh, yeah. All of them. That's what I'm saying. It's not just CNN. I just was using them. Yeah, they're all doing it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
They're all taking funding.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Which actually had nothing to do with him, by the way.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Yes. Oh, my gosh. A lot. All sorts of stuff.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
I know how you did that. I was vegetarian for five and I tried to dabble in the world, but I could never fully. Yeah.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
And it's crazy. Yeah.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
I do, yeah. She grew up on a farm. I don't know her personally.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Oh, that makes me feel sick.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
I mean, so there's a couple of really easy ones depending on your budget, but I would say get a really good air filter. I have an air filter in every room in my house. And if you're lucky to do that, at least just get one really good one. I love Jasper. They're a little bit more expensive. There's also another brand called Air Doctor that I love. There's a lot of great ones out there.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Those are just the ones I've looked into. So do your own research. Find a really good air filter. The EPA is also saying that our indoor air is even more toxic than our outdoor air. And it's a combination of, you know, cooking, you're doing candles, burning candles, the off-gassing of all your furniture. And then on top of that, you think about how many hours a day you spend in your house, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
So get a good air filter. Make sure that it's a good one. Um, and hopefully you can invest in one that will last you a long time. Um, air or sorry, water filter is also a really good one. Water quality is a huge one that we need to be worried about. There's so much of pesticides are getting in there, heavy metals, pharmaceutical drugs, everything.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
So fluoride, fluoride, which hopefully Bobby's going to address if we get them in there. But yeah, there's a lot of concern with that too. Um, and then also, you know, I tell people like, look, We need to control what we can control, but don't live in fear because if you're living in fear and anxiety, that's also not going to serve you. And also, we're here to live. We're here to live our lives.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
So do the things that you can control and then trust that you're doing the best that you can. Our bodies are also really resilient. And then get a sauna if you can afford it. If you can't afford a sauna, draw a really hot bath. Put Epsom salts in there. Make it to where you're going to get a good sweat and do that a couple times a week. Or honestly, just exercise every day.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Because it gets your lymphatic system moving. Your lymphatic system is like the sewage system of your body. It's going to sweat out. You're going to sweat out all the toxins, get them out. So just moving your body and sweating as much as you can, just making sure that you can get rid of all that stuff that we're being exposed to.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
And then try not to worry about it and just trust that you're doing the best that you can. And we're all in this together, you know.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Exactly.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Exactly. Exactly. I think people think that I like live in a bubble and I obsess about this. I honestly like some of my friends are shocked at how chill I am about it. I think it's just because it's become such a part of my life. Like I filter my water. I eat organic food. Like I have these little habits in place that I've been doing for so long. And then I just try not to worry about it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
I mean, I just did a sauna last night and I feel great. Like just I try to do those things to mitigate the exposures because we're all going to be exposed whether we like it or not. And so just try not to stress about it. Do the best you can, you know, and then live your life.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Yeah. So the Real Foodology podcast, it's on all major podcast platforms. I'm the most active on Instagram, which is also just Real Foodology. I'm becoming more active on X, Twitter, whatever you want to call it. And I'm also on TikTok. But I wasn't that worried about it being banned because I'm not as active on it. But I'm happy that it wasn't banned. It's great that it's still there.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
So I'm also on TikTok and everything across the board is Real Foodology.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Yeah, thank you so much.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
I know, I was going to say the same thing. That's like up there. Number one, yeah.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Yeah, I mean, it's wild. I never thought I would find myself here. I mean, I was in school. So in 2011, I was getting my master's of science in nutrition. And around that time, I was finding the works of people like Vani Hari. We just brought her up, the food babe, Dr. Mark Hyman, Michael Pollan.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
So this morning was a Senate hearing confirmation for RFK Jr. And that was, did you watch it?
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
And they were really trying to sound the alarm back then about what was happening with our food system. But largely, it was being ignored, especially by our media and by our So I got very involved in it back then because I felt like the American people needed to know what was happening with their food. You know, we were blindly being poisoned.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Yeah, it's interesting. The younger generation, I think, are really feeling pretty pissed off about this because they feel like the boomers have just poisoned all of us and allowed it to happen and then lied to us about it. Yeah. That's what I'm picking up on on TikTok.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Yeah.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
And even though when you feel like you're maybe making the right choices and making healthy choices, if you don't know how to navigate all this, like chances are you may not be. So I was so passionate about this. And then fast forward, I just ended up in this Maha movement. But I've been doing this for about 15 years now. Like this isn't a trend thing that I've just been jumping onto.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
Oh, that's right.
Dhru Purohit Show
Behind the Scenes of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Movement with Food Activist Courtney Swan
He's been, yeah. He's been coming out. He's been interesting, yeah.
The Dr. Tyna Show
Stop Letting Your MRI Define You—The Truth About Pain & Healing | Dr. Danny Shapiro
Join the club.
The Dr. Tyna Show
Stop Letting Your MRI Define You—The Truth About Pain & Healing | Dr. Danny Shapiro
Yeah, yeah.
The Dr. Tyna Show
Stop Letting Your MRI Define You—The Truth About Pain & Healing | Dr. Danny Shapiro
Are you looking to reclaim your health? Tune into the Real Foodology podcast hosted by me, Courtney Swan, integrative nutritionist and real food activist. I'm on a mission to transform our food system by challenging the corrupt practices that undermine our health and replace them with choices that genuinely support our wellbeing. Listen to Real Foodology podcast on your favorite podcast app.
The Dr. Tyna Show
Stop Letting Your MRI Define You—The Truth About Pain & Healing | Dr. Danny Shapiro
New episodes every Tuesday.
The Dr. Tyna Show
The Superfood for Hormones, Energy & Aging—Why Algae Changes Everything | ENERGYBits
Exactly.
The Dr. Tyna Show
The Superfood for Hormones, Energy & Aging—Why Algae Changes Everything | ENERGYBits
Are you looking to reclaim your health? Tune into the Real Foodology podcast hosted by me, Courtney Swan, integrative nutritionist and real food activist. I'm on a mission to transform our food system by challenging the corrupt practices that undermine our health and replace them with choices that genuinely support our wellbeing. Listen to Real Foodology podcast on your favorite podcast app.
The Dr. Tyna Show
The Superfood for Hormones, Energy & Aging—Why Algae Changes Everything | ENERGYBits
New episodes every Tuesday.
The Dr. Tyna Show
GLP1s and Dementia: What the Latest Science Shows | Quick + Dirty
Are you looking to reclaim your health? Tune into the Real Foodology podcast hosted by me, Courtney Swan, integrative nutritionist and real food activist. I'm on a mission to transform our food system by challenging the corrupt practices that undermine our health and replace them with choices that genuinely support our wellbeing. Listen to Real Foodology podcast on your favorite podcast app.
The Dr. Tyna Show
GLP1s and Dementia: What the Latest Science Shows | Quick + Dirty
New episodes every Tuesday.
The Dr. Tyna Show
Tirzepatide + Metabolic Health: What the Latest Study Really Shows | Solo
Are you looking to reclaim your health? Tune into the Real Foodology podcast hosted by me, Courtney Swan, integrative nutritionist and real food activist. I'm on a mission to transform our food system by challenging the corrupt practices that undermine our health and replace them with choices that genuinely support our wellbeing. Listen to Real Foodology podcast on your favorite podcast app.
The Dr. Tyna Show
Tirzepatide + Metabolic Health: What the Latest Study Really Shows | Solo
New episodes every Tuesday.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
I was looking for answers, right? But I was looking in all the wrong places. I was eating slim fast bars for breakfast and thinking that I was going to lose weight and like get healthy, which is so ironic.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
And there was also this notion, which we're still seeing today, is that they wanted to feed the world. So this is when we started introducing things like glyphosate, for example, which is one that I really am hyper-focused on right now. I'm incredibly concerned about glyphosate. over 90% of Americans were finding glyphosate in their urine. And it's coming up in placenta.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
It's coming up in breast milk.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Yeah. Even those of us that are eating organic and we're doing really hard and we're doing saunas and we're detoxing, we are all finding it in our blood. And it is... So incredibly concerning. So glyphosate is an herbicide. It's also known as Roundup, which was created by Monsanto.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Now, in 2018, Bayer, which is a pharmaceutical company, bought Monsanto, and now they are also a agrochemical company, and they own a majority of our food system now because they have patented genetically modified seeds, which are corn, wheat, and, or sorry, sorry, we just started genetically modifying wheat recently, but corn and soy are the majority of those.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Now, during the war, what we did is we started paying subsidies to farmers. What are subsidies? These come from taxpayer dollars, and it's money that we give to farmers in order to incentivize them to grow specific crops. Now, some of the crops that we do with that are corn and soy.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Now, it's why I would encourage everybody listening, if you have any ultra-processed foods in your cabinet, I would go and I would read the label, and I would argue that almost every single one of them that you pick up, it's going to say, may contain corn, wheat, and soy.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
They're in everything because we are paying farmers to grow them. So we have them in surplus and it's cheaper. It's more accessible. It's more affordable. Again, we have it in excess. So we're using it in everything. And so not only is it being pushed into our ultra processed foods in the forms of, you know, vegetable oils, all of our processed grains, corn syrup is a really big one.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Yeah, we're also using that to feed our livestock. So we're also getting it on the other end in our meat, our dairy, and our eggs. And glyphosate is incredibly concerning. It has very concerning backstories. So this is actually what I did my Senate speech on. I was so grateful to be a part of this roundtable, this nutrition roundtable.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
It was hosted by Senator Ron Johnson back in September, and it was with Vani Hari and Michaela Peterson, Jordan Peterson, RFK Jr., Callie and Casey Means.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Yeah. He was working for as a lobbyist for companies like Coca-Cola.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
So it's fascinating because he has a really, he had a look under the hood that many people are not actually revealing to the general public, which was fascinating. I had him on my podcast a couple of years ago and same thing. I was blown away because a lot of what he is saying, he's just validating what a lot of us have been trying to say for years.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
This is what many people need to understand is that the majority of the food on our shelves was not created with health in mind. It was created with profits in mind.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
And he came out and he said, yeah, this is all true. I was literally in the boardrooms.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
A part of these conversations.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to have you. This is so much fun. We were talking earlier on my podcast about how we just felt like little kids were just like so excited. Yeah.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Exactly.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Exactly. Again, at the time, I think it was great. It was this modern technology. Oh my gosh, what do you mean? We don't have to can everything now. We can just add these additives and preservatives in there that will prolong the shelf life. This is what many people need to understand is that the majority of the food on our shelves was not created with health in mind. It was created...
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
with profits in mind because they want it to be shelf stable so that it can stay on the shelf for long periods of time. I was doing this little personal experiment at my house, still kind of ongoing, and I've released two videos about this already, but I bought just a bunch of conventional bread, loaves of bread from the grocery store in December. I got Sara Lee and some other like-
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
It's almost April. Those bags have been open. They've just been open, sitting on my counter since December, and there is not a drop of mold on any single one of them.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Nothing. They smell quote-unquote fresh. Wow. Like it's still squishy. It's not dry.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Yes.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Yep.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
So glyphosate, well, first of all, the reason I'm most concerned about it is because it's become so ubiquitous. So we're spraying it on all of our fields. The back story of glyphosate is they were using a lot of these chemicals in World War II. Nazis were using them as nerve agents in gas chambers. They weren't using glyphosate specifically, but they were using known insecticides and pesticides.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
And they have similar chemical components to glyphosate. And then same with the Vietnam War. Agent Orange was created by Monsanto. So now, fast forward, these agrochemical companies need somewhere to use their chemicals and their fertilizers. And so they pivoted to spraying them on farmlands. And what happened initially is they said, oh, they're totally fine.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
These are not harmful at all to health. So the farmers are spraying down their crops with everything, and the glyphosate was killing everything, including the plants that they were trying to grow. So what happened was they genetically modified seeds.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
They genetically modified plants to grow to where they could just spray the fields with glyphosate, and everything would get covered in glyphosate, and the plant itself wouldn't die, but it would kill everything else off. Well, here's the issue with that. And this is where I get super passionate about something called regenerative farming because the soil, we talk a lot about soil health.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
So glyphosate also acts like an antibiotic, which means that it's not only killing off bad bacteria, but it's also killing off of the good bacteria. And we talked about how a lot of people are consuming glyphosate and they're getting it in their bodies. And then everyone's having all these IBS and Crohn's and gut issues and leaky gut syndrome.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Exactly. Well, it's no wonder because all of us are consuming an antibiotic almost on a daily basis and we don't even know. And on top of that, it's not labeled. It doesn't need to be on the label. So people can be consuming it and they have no clue.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Now, where my passion really comes in in all this is that when we're spraying our soil with glyphosate, because it's an antibiotic, we're killing off the entire ecosystem of soil that makes the plants healthy in the first place. I don't know if you've heard this before, but I've heard this quoted often. We are only as healthy as our soil is.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Because our plants are growing in our soil. And if our soil does not have the ecosystem, the bacteria, the bugs, there's this whole ecosystem that half of what we probably still don't even understand what's going on there. We're killing all of that. The soil is barely hanging on.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
And then we think that the plants that are going to grow out are going to come out with enough vitamins, minerals and nutrients for us. Absolutely not.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
And when you leave nature to do what it is intended to do, what it's meant to do, which is a thing called regenerative farming, there's this incredible process that happens called carbon sequestration where carbon is actually pulled out of the atmosphere because a lot of people were super concerned for good reason about there being too much carbon in the atmosphere.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
If we leave nature to do her thing, she pulls the carbon out of the atmosphere and that is actually food for the soil. And if we're not spraying it with all these chemical interventions, we're letting the soil thrive with the bacteria and the bugs and everything that it's meant to be and how it's meant to be there. The carbons in the soil and it's this really deep, rich, like beautiful black soil.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
That's going to be food for the plants.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
And we see so many articles now saying, oh, our food is losing, you know, it's devoid of vitamins, minerals and nutrients. You talk about this all the time.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Yes, exactly.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
And I love cows. That actually breaks my heart.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Well, I saw something online too. And a farmer actually verified this to me. Um, they're starting to feed candy to our livestock now too, just to fatten them up. They don't even think about the nutritional value anymore of like, oh, how can we feed them so that they're, you know, healthy and they get enough nutrients. No, they're just like, how can we fatten them up as fast and quick as possible?
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
So they're feeding them candy bars. They'll just throw candy bars in their feet. And sometimes they don't even take the wrappers off. I heard.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
That's a great question. I mean, look, if I could just change one thing, it would just be can we just get these additives out of our food and focus on real food?
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
I think a lot of it is there's an education component there because there's a large portion of the population that's been eating so much foods out of packages that they, one, are scared to cook now or they feel like they can't cook or maybe it hasn't been passed down through generations through them anymore. So I definitely think there's an educational component there. So how can we really start?
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
And honestly, what I would love to see is we start doing this in schools with kids. Have them, when they're in kindergarten, have them start tending a garden and teach them the importance of growing your food and then show them how that food is then ending up on their plates for lunch. And then how can we have them have a cooking class? I think this should start very, very early.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Because there is a large education component there because now we're just telling, because this is, I have a huge issue about this. I actually just talked about this on a podcast yesterday. We are telling people, oh, you don't have time to cook or it's so expensive, don't even try. So I think so many people are not even trying anymore.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
They're not even attempting it because they just think like, okay, well, that's one that's too expensive for me and it's not going to be accessible for me and it's super hard. We live in the most amazing time of information. You can literally open TikTok, open YouTube, and just type in any recipe you want to make, and you can watch a video of it.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
So you can very easily, and I think so many people are scared to cook, but it is so easy. It doesn't have to be complicated. Grill up a steak, and then bake some sweet potatoes, and then add a little arugula on the side. Like, done. It does not have to be so hard. So from a policy standpoint... What we need to do is a couple of things.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
I think, first of all, we need to stop paying subsidies for foods that are driving our chronic disease. Corn and soy, like I said earlier, are largely making up of the majority of the food like products.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Yes, so over 90% of our corn is genetically modified and over 90% of our soy is genetically modified. And those are a lot of what we're paying subsidies for. And then wheat as well. And then wheat is just now starting to be genetically modified. And so that means that it can withstand glyphosate. So you hear all this talk online saying, oh, GMOs actually means less pesticides.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
No, the pesticides are quite literally in some of those seeds that are genetically modified. And if they're not, they're having to spray everything like crazy with glyphosate. So it actually means
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Exactly. Because we're eating organic and we're going above and beyond. I mean, I filter my water. I filter my shower. I'm eating all organic in my home. The only time I don't eat organic is when I'm eating out and I can't control it.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Yeah, well, first and foremost, the reason I'm such a huge supporter of organic food in general is because there's a lot of laws and regulations around what is allowed and what is allowed to be sprayed on organic food. So legally, by law, if it's stamped organic, it means that it was not allowed to be sprayed by glyphosate.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
If it's meat or dairy, it wasn't allowed to be injected with growth hormones. They're not allowed to give them pharmaceutical drugs. There's a lot of laws around it. Also, they can't eat genetically modified crops. with organic. So if you buy organic meat, exactly, you know that they're not eating this pesticide-laden grains.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
So that to me is the biggest concern right now and why I feel like it's non-negotiable. But what is so insidious about all this is that organic is just what we should be eating. There should not be two different options. What I would love to see is that we're just not using these pesticides anymore. And organic is just the only option. It's just food, right?
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Because, you know, 50 years ago when our grandparents were eating, they were eating organic, but they weren't labeling it organic. It just was food.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Yeah, it was a journey for me to get there for sure. We had talked about this earlier off camera, but I started out working in music actually. My mom had really planted the seeds for me when I was a kid because she was buying organic and natural food before it was even a movement or a thing. And when I was a kid, like most kids, you don't realize how good you have it, right?
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Yeah.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Well, we're seeing a really concerning trend right now. I would encourage people to Google this because you can actually look up photos. So, look, you can never outsmart nature. Nature always finds a way.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
And what's happening with a lot of these weeds that were initially being killed off by glyphosate, you're seeing these crazy glyphosate-resistant weeds popping up everywhere that the farmers don't really know how to handle because they're no longer – responding to the glyphosate. And so it's, again, like nature always finds a way.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
It's similar to like, you know, like the antibiotic resistance that we see when you're taking too much antibiotics. And we're seeing it a lot because we're giving it prophylactically to our livestock. So there is, yeah, there's a huge concern with that as well. And there's a lot of
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
pushback against the organic movement from the agrochemical companies because they say, well, how are the farmers going to survive? How are we going to feed the world? How are we going to create enough food for everyone? And what I always tell people is there's this amazing farming systems trial that's been going on for 40 years.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
And what it is, it's been an ongoing study that's still happening right now. They've been doing it for 40 years through the Rodale Institute. And what they do is they have conventional farming on one side and then they have organic farming on the other side.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
It's incredible. Yeah. And what they have found is that in this organic farming system, it produces the same, if not sometimes even more yield than what the conventional is yielding. And then on top of that, it's sustainable. Because what we're doing in our conventional model right now is we're getting to a point where we are desertifying the soil.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
And we're depleting it of so much nutrients that at some point you literally cannot plant there anymore. And you have to go somewhere else to plant. And they are theorizing if we continue down this path and we keep ignoring this, that we have about, depending on who you talk to, anywhere between like 52 to 54 harvests left where we will no longer have soil that's plantable for plants.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
So we need to do something because what we're doing right now, it's just a quick fix. Right. It's not long term sustainable. And our, you know, our grandkids are not even going to have soil left to plant in. Right.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
I was watching all my friends eating Dunkaroos and getting Burger King every night for dinner, and I was upset. And then I was going home to my amazing, organic, home-cooked meals that my mom would be in the kitchen almost for two hours every night making everything from scratch.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
I really hope so. That is one of my number one dreams, like hopes that we get out of Maha. I know Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is incredibly passionate about regenerative farming and I know he knows about it. And also too, we know that it can be done large scale.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
I mean, we have these farmers like Will Harris and Joel Salatin that have these huge regenerative farms and they all came from the traditional conventional path and they switched over to regenerative. And they also provide a lot of resources for farmers that want to switch over.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
It's also healthier for the farmers because they're not using all this glyphosate and all the other stuff that so many of these farmers, no one is really talking about this. So many of these farmers are now getting non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
They're getting crazy aggressive forms of cancer from using these chemicals.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Exactly. But part of the issue is that we need an entire reform of our food system here in America because right now we have... I don't know the exact number, but we have a small amount of just really large industrialized farms. And then they're just shipping out everything across the country.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
And what people don't realize is that an apple that you get at the grocery store has probably been, it was probably three weeks from being picked because they picked it and then they sprayed it with something in the truck that makes it ripen while it's on its trip to you.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
And then finally, by the time you get it at the grocery store, it was picked like three weeks ago and it was ripened in the back of a truck, not on a tree. And we're doing this largely across all of our food systems. So what we need to do is we need to incentivize farmers to go back to regenerative farming. We need more local farms where we can get local produce from our communities.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Yeah, I was like, I want the McDonald's. Like, I want a happy meal. And now, I mean, obviously, I am so beyond grateful. I went to college. I started eating fast food. And I don't even recognize who that person is anymore. But, you know, I was eating in the dining hall, which is, you know, Cisco and Shamrock Foods catering. And I gained a bunch of weight. I got acne I never had before.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
I think a lot of these smaller farmers that are super passionate about all this, they're all getting pushed out by these big industrialized farms that are taking over everything. And then they're just ruining our food supply and they're spraying everything and they're conventionally farming. And, yeah, to your point, I mean, you talk about this all the time, the nutritional deficiencies.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Americans are overfed and undernourished.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
They're eating so much more.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Exactly.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
And we're not getting enough nutrients from our foods because we're really not eating a lot of real foods anymore. And then when we are, they're devoid of vitamins and minerals and nutrients that were there before. And this is another argument for organic. There's been a lot of studies and testing done.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
And they find time and time again that conventional crops, you think that the organic food is lower and devoid of nutrients and minerals and vitamins. The conventionally grown has like nothing left.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
So at least with organic, it's higher in the vitamin and mineral content. And it's still a lot lower than generations before. But at least in organic, it has higher amounts than the conventional does.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Some of that's happening right now.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Yes, not suicidal. I love my family. I'm about to get married. I'm very excited. No, I mean, really, honestly, my fiance recently was like, are we good talking about some of this stuff publicly?
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
And, you know, I'm very spiritual and I really believe that I came to Earth with a purpose. And my purpose is to help people thrive and wake them up to I think it's greater than even the food system.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
But I think right now, currently, my mission is to help people wake up to their own innate power and knowingness about themselves and knowing how to feed themselves and how to take care of themselves and how to thrive. Because. the human body wants to be healthy. We just need to give it the right tools to, and healthy can be, it's so much more than just diet, right? It's, it's your mental state.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
I was fatigued. And it wasn't until I took a nutrition course. And also, my mom had sent me a book on nutrition. It was literally just called You Are What You Eat.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Um, it's your community, how much sleep you're getting. Like it's more than just the food, but I really believe that I came here with a purpose and I, I just can't shut up. So like, sorry, I'm not going to stop talking about it. And so I feel like I have a certain protection. I know he's like, you're going to get, Okay, so glyphosate.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
This is where it does become insidious, because now that they know that this is happening. I mentioned earlier, Monsanto was bought out by Bayer in 2018, and then shortly after that, Bayer, which was before Monsanto, started getting pulled into a ton of litigations with mostly farmers, but just Americans in general that were getting non-Hodgkin's lymphoma from glyphosate.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
To this day, they have spent over $2 billion paying back farmers and other Americans that have gotten non-Hodgkin's lymphoma from glyphosate. The IARC, which is the International Agency for Research on Cancer through the World Health Organization, says that glyphosate, it classifies glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen. Now, meaning that we probably basically know that it causes cancer.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
So this is why it's so incredibly concerning. And now Bayer knows this, but they are currently working and they're going state by state. It's actually on the governor's desk right now in Georgia. They're going state by state. They're trying to go through their legislators. They're senators to get immunity from being sued if someone gets cancer.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
And because I was looking for answers. Right. But I was looking in all the wrong places. I was eating slim fast bars for breakfast and thinking that I was going to lose weight and like get healthy, which is so ironic. Right. And I found this book. It's called You Are What You Eat. And it really just it was talk about a light bulb moment for me. It made me really understand. Oh, wow.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
So essentially, if this passes in Georgia, it would mean that if you or I were farming or just in general, if we were using glyphosate in our lawn and we got cancer and the research shows that glyphosate is connected to cancer and we got the cancer and we're using the glyphosate, we would not legally be allowed to sue them.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
It's actually the same thing that the vaccine companies went for in 1986, which is the immunity shield, where if you get harmed by a vaccine, you can't hold the company liable.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
I mean, it's insidious. Why can't we just stop using the chemicals? But instead, they're pushing back even further, and they want to get this immunity. And if it passes through Georgia, there's a huge concern that then it's just going to pass like wildfire throughout all the other states.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
So we're currently trying to block it. In fact, I post about it all the time on my Instagram. I post numbers that you can call, emails you can call.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
What's going to stand the test of time when it comes to nutrition and health? We always need to be coming back to eating real food.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Well, okay, I think first and foremost, I would be remiss without talking about this. You have to reframe and understand that there may be a little bit of budgeting and reframing of priorities that has to happen. Because unfortunately, we are living in a time right now, if you do not make time for your wellness, you will be forced to make time for your illness. It is just that dire at this point.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
And I'm not trying to scare anyone, but I believe in telling people the truth. And if you know this, then you're going to be way more inclined to actually want to take action. So some of that is, okay, instead of, you know, eating out for every meal or postmating everything or going to Starbucks every single morning, how can you make that coffee at home?
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
How can you stop getting food delivered every single night? How can you have just dinner out one night a week and make it more of a special thing? and start focusing on buying groceries and cooking at home. It doesn't have to be these fancy five-course meals. It can be something really simple to make. I think also, too, people think that fast food is cheap. It is no longer cheap.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
In fact, I did a series on my podcast called Organic for Everyone. It was so much fun.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Yes. My producer and I would go and we would buy really popular fast food items and see how much the cost of that was. Like we did Taco Bell cheesy gordita crunch, for example. And then we also bought all the ingredients to make that at home. Every single ingredient was organic. We were buying it from super accessible stores like Walmart, Ralph's, Kroger.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Every single ingredient was organic. And then we made a copycat of that at home. And every single time it was cheaper to buy all organic groceries and make it at home than it was to go through the drive-thru.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
The things that I'm putting in my body, the food that I'm eating is quite literally building my cells. And it's going to either determine whether I have good energy and I'm going to be at a healthy weight and I'm not going to be inflamed all the time or it's going to drive all of that.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
And it's so funny looking back to that now thinking how much of a light bulb moment that was for me. But it really lit a fire under my ass because I quite to be quite frank, I was pretty mad that I had not learned that sooner because I was probably 20 at that point. And you were in college. And I was thinking, why aren't we teaching small children this? Why doesn't every human know this?
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
I say this all the time. Convenience is killing us. It really is. And we think that it's so, I said this earlier, it has been so hammered into us. Oh, it's so expensive to eat healthy. It's so expensive. I am not, I'm by no means saying that I think that some of this stuff is not overpriced. And I know if you really start getting into ins and outs of it, it can get really expensive.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
But if you are dire straits really on a budget, forget the organic, okay? That is concerning and I focus on it. But like if you are dire straits and you were just trying to eat more whole real foods, Just get ground beef, rice, beans, a big quart of yogurt. Normally, eggs are well-priced. I think they're going back down right now.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Oh, okay. I've been traveling, so I haven't gone to the grocery store recently. But focus on the basics like that. And like you said, get fruit and get yogurt and just focus on eating as many whole real foods as you can and dump all the convenience because it's expensive. Yeah.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Trash Panda where you can scan everything. So people can go and scan everything in the grocery store.
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171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
And then it'll tell you it rates it. And then they tell you all the ingredients that are red flag, why they're red flags. And then it'll, it'll give you, um, alternative options.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
It's so cute.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
And I was also thinking, too, looking at all my parents' friends and older generations, and a lot of them still hadn't figured it out. And I was so flabbergasted, for lack of a better word, because I was like, this is so simple, right? It's so simple. The things that we're eating and we're putting in our bodies are either fighting disease or fueling it, you know?
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
It drives the consumer trends. Actually, during our Senate speech, Jason Karp, who's the founder of Hugh Kitchen, he actually said this, and he knows what it's like to be in those boardrooms with those companies. And he said that a company like, for example, Kellogg's General Mills, if they see just a 10% drop in their sales, they scramble. Just 10%. Do you know how little that is?
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Exactly. But I mean, from our perspective of like, if we all of a sudden just decide, like, we're not going to buy it from their products anymore and we're going to buy from a smaller local farm or, you know, a smaller company that's actually doing right by us. That doesn't take that many people to see a huge shift like that.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
And I mean, look at organic. Organic has absolutely exploded in the last 10 years and it's all driven by consumer trends.
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171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
We drive that with our money. I think people don't understand how much power we actually really have.
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171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
They're gonna be forced to make that change for everyone else too.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
And these American companies are making these for other countries. That's what drives me nuts about it.
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171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
I know.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
And so that really ignited a passion in me. And then I just could not get enough information. I found Michael Pollan back then when he was writing about food. I found Dr. Mark Hyman. I think I read one of his very first books. Love him. And he introduced me to this world of functional and integrative medicine, which is root cause, disease protocol.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
But you know what that is actually? So Jason Carpigan was talking about this at our Senate hearing, and he was emailing back and forth with one of these companies. And the issue is that they have realized that the brightly colored cereals and brightly colored fruit snacks or whatever it is that they're adding those dyes into make them more appealing and addictive to children.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
And so that's why they do it. So Trix actually famously a couple years ago, they announced, we're taking out all the artificial colors.
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171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Yeah. And they're like, we're going to use natural dyes, you know, to color them. Well, they're not as bright because they're colors made in nature. It's why when you see cereal, it's like fluorescent highlighter color. It's not colors.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Yeah. It's like highlighter colors. They actually saw a dramatic drop in their sales because Trix was the only one that was doing it. And so they brought them back. So this is a large part of the issue is that these companies are digging their heels in because they're like, no, we're going to lose money off of the profit of these cereals.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
If everyone was forced to, then the kids will just have to acclimate. And honestly, it will be so much better for them. The reason why they've banned them in places like the UK and Sweden is because they have recognized that these dyes cause hyperactivity in children. Talk to anyone who's an educator and who's been in the space for the last 20 years.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
I can't tell you how many teachers DM me almost on a day-to-day basis. And they'll say, I've been working for, you know, 20 years as an educator and I have never seen so many behavioral issues ever in my life.
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171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Oh, that condition largely didn't exist 50 years ago. That one really gets me.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Um, where you're looking at the root cause and you're looking for the root cause and trying to mitigate symptoms with diet and lifestyle changes. So that really affected me a lot. I was in school or sorry, I was actually touring at the time. Um, I finally decided on the music industry. Exactly. So I was with the music industry.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
I would say first and foremost, do an audit of your pantry and just start paying attention and reading ingredient labels. If you can do that one shift and start slowly swapping out a lot of your normal everyday food products that you're buying for ones that are made with real ingredients, you're going to be off to a great start. So I have a really, really simple hack for this.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
When you're in the grocery store and you're reading a label, And you see all the ingredients in there. You never want to just look at the front. The front is a billboard for the package. They're just trying to sell it.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Yep, and I would say the more health claims they make on the front is usually a really red flag. So you'll learn, here's the thing. The first couple of times you do this, you'll probably spend a couple of hours in the grocery store, sorry.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
But you get in a rhythm and then you kind of understand and then you know what foods you like and you kind of start to understand which ones are just the red flag.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Exactly. So my rule is if you can read, so read all those ingredients. If you could technically, if you wanted to make this product at home, I'm not saying you have to, but let's say that you were like, okay, if I wanted to make these crackers at home, could I buy every single one of those ingredients in the grocery store? I always use Simple Mills as an example. Simple Mills has rosemary extract.
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171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Um, I decided to quit that and I went back and I got my master's of science in nutrition and integrative health. Wow. And then actually during that time, I got pulled back on the road and I ended up being a nutritionist for four years for a pop star. Really? Yeah, which was pretty amazing.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
It's made with almonds, just all whole real foods. You could technically buy every single one of those ingredients in the grocery store and put it in your cart and make those crackers at home if you wanted to.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Whereas alternatively, if you turn around something like Cheez-Its, it has BHT in there. It has some preservatives and some other crap in there that you're reading that. You're going, I have no idea where I would find BHT in the grocery store. Where would I find that in the grocery store? It doesn't exist.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
So that would be something that I would say, put that one back on the shelf, look around. There's a lot of different alternatives now. If you're looking for a cheese like cracker, there's a couple of other brands now that are creating ones that are just made with real food ingredients. If you start doing something like that- That is, you're already going to be off to a great start.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Another one that I love to remind people, real food tastes amazing. Amazing. It is so good. Especially if you, you learn a couple of things that you love to make. You can repeat those, get, you know, follow some creators online that teach you how to make really simple, whole real food ingredient recipes. Also, you don't have to give up your favorite foods. We literally had burgers for lunch.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
I eat burgers a couple of times a week.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
It was delicious. It was so good. And this is what I remind people all the time. You don't have to give up your favorite foods, but make sure that when you're eating those foods, they're made with whole real food ingredients. So if you can't find a restaurant nearby that's using 100% Italian flour or whatever it is in their pizza dough, make pizza at home. Make those burgers at home.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Or find a really good burger place that has grass-fed burgers and beef tallow fries if you can find them. So that would be my second one.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
you do not have to be restrictive. In fact, I have never had a healthier relationship with my food ever in my entire life. I've never had a healthier relationship with it because as long as it's real food, nothing is off the table for me. I don't feel like I'm like, oh, I can't have that cookie or whatever. I'm like, is it made with real ingredients? Great, I'm gonna have a cookie, love it.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
That's my only restriction is that I want it to be made with real food. Whereas before when I was eating like slim fast bars and stuff, I was literally trying to like, oh, how many calories is in this? And, you know, like trying to track everything. And I don't even think of that way anymore.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
And then I would say the last one is try to eat try to eat as many meals at home as you can. Because when you eat out, this is when you're gonna start seeing the additives and the seed oils and everything else. So try to eat as many meals at home as possible.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
And it was very cool because it was, you know, I got to kind of blend both of my favorite worlds, which was nutrition and then being on tour and getting to work for musicians, which was so much fun. But I did hit a point where, um, you know, we kind of talked about this on my podcast that it was really starting to, to really like tax my body.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
I think, oh, man, I have to think about this for a second. How do I want to answer this? I think to be an ultimate human is to live with your soul's purpose and also to live in integrity and always strive for the truth and to be the best you can for yourself and for everyone in your life and everyone that you love.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
One of the main reasons that I got into healthy eating in the first place is because I knew what it felt like to feel really sick. I think a lot of people largely walk through life not even knowing how sick they actually are and how sick they actually feel because they have no comparison.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
And I went from feeling really good in my home, then going out of the home and eating like crap all the time, feeling really sick, and then coming back and realizing, oh my gosh, this is what so many Americans go through every day and they feel this way and they don't even realize. So I think... learning how to nourish my body, take care of my body, um, and just to feel better.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
And then as a result, I'm more clear headed. I'm more in touch with my innate knowing, um, what's best for me and I can have better discernment. And yeah, it just, it helps me live a better, more full life. And, and also I just, I want to live a full life. I want to have fun. I want to have fun. I want to have fun with my friends. I want to have energy. I want to do all the things I want to do.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
I have so many things that I want to accomplish. And I think, um, Being healthy and taking care of my body allows me to do all of that and show up for others.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Yeah. So I'm at Real Foodology across the board on Instagram. I have a podcast called Real Foodology. I'm starting to get more active on X and yeah. Oh, also I have a free grocery guide. If you go to realfoodology.com and you just plug in your email, you'll get a free grocery guide sent to you. And it goes over everything we talked about today.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Like I just was feeling the effects of not getting enough sleep and you know, it is harder to eat healthy. And so I finally in 2019 decided to no longer tour anymore. And I had been building real foodology on the side. And at the time it really was more just of a hobby. I really had no plan. I had no like goals or plans of turning this into anything.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
And you can just take it with you to the grocery store. If you're like, well, what did Courtney say on the podcast about X, Y, and Z? And you can reference it in that.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
other than it started with a passion where I felt like this was information that people largely didn't know. And I was seeing so many people suffer. And like you just said a minute ago, I wanna see people thrive. And so I started Real Foodology as a blog and I was just kind of Instagramming my touring life. And then in 2019, I was like, you know what? I'm gonna pursue this full time.
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171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Started my podcast in 2020.
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171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Yeah, and then it just kind of has exploded from there.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
just because it's happening to a lot of people and it's becoming normalized does not mean that it's okay. That does not have to be your experience.
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171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Pizza, pasta.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
So that is one of the biggest myths in all of this, in the nutrition, wellness, and medical system that really drives me nuts is that people just think, oh, this is just what happens. You start aging, and then you don't feel that well, and your energy plummets, and then you maybe have to go on a couple of medications, and maybe you get diabetes. Oh, that's just aging. I hear that all the time.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
It's just, oh, well, it's just part of being human. That does not have to be your experience.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
That's a great question. If I could just change one thing that has been the basis of my entire business and my message is that we need to be
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171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
60%.
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171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
That's more than half of our diet.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
So that would be processing. Yeah. So there's a lot of discrepancy between like processing versus ultra-processed because I see some of these like RDs or dissenting voices out there that are saying, oh, well – Apple sauce is processed. Bread is processed. So that is absolutely true.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
But there is a huge difference between eating applesauce that maybe is just made with apple and maybe that a little bit of sugar and some water versus if you were going to go to McDonald's and get an apple pie. So the difference between ultra processed and just something simply processing that we've been doing since the dawn of time is.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
With ultra processed foods, you're adding a ton of additives and preservatives and fillers in there. And that food no longer resembles what that natural state of food once was. I often tell people if your grandparents were to time travel or maybe like your great grandparents, like someone who's no longer alive.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
If they were to time travel and you just drop them into 2025 and you took them to the grocery store and you showed them all these food products that we're eating.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
they probably wouldn't even know where it came from. They wouldn't even be able to tell you just by looking at it. Like, oh, I know that that is from potatoes. They would be like, what is that? That would be something that would be ultra processed foods. Ultra processed foods are made with a bunch of ingredients that you would not normally have in your kitchen.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
There are a bunch of ingredients that you find in factories. And my argument and the whole reason that I started Real Foodology, my whole thing was when I came up with that name 14 years ago is I sat down and I thought, what's gonna stand the test of time when it comes to nutrition and health? We always need to be coming back to eating real food.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
And that has been the basis of my entire business and my message is that we need to be getting back to eating real food. And right now, the majority of our calories are coming from these ultra-processed foods.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
I don't think people understand how detrimental it is actually.
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171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Yeah. So I largely believe that most of this stuff started with good intention. The problem is that now that we have the data and the science and we know that these chemicals and certain processing things that we're doing with our food, we now know that they are harming people. And now it is to the point where it is becoming sinister, in my opinion. But I don't think it started out that way.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
largely a lot of what we're dealing with now, which is an industrialization of our food system, was started because of the war. After the war, there was famine. Our president was genuinely concerned about getting enough food to people, having it be cheap, accessible, fast.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
So that's when we started paying subsidies to farmers because they thought, okay, what crops can we grow just rows and rows and rows of, grow them really fast, and then commoditize them?
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Commoditize them. Why was that so hard for me to get out?
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
Infantilize maybe?
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
It's fun. I've been trying to broaden my words.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
171. Courtney Swan: Why Your ‘Healthy’ Food Is Actually Harmful
I'd be like, oh, Gary got that from me.