American Thought Leaders

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy recently unveiled a new food pyramid and dietary guidelines for Americans that emphasize high-quality protein, dairy, healthy fats, vegetables, and fruits. Whole grains are downgraded, and processed foods and added sugars are discouraged.
“We’ve been consuming this ultra-processed food, which I call human pet food,” says Dr. Shawn Baker. A former orthopedic surgeon and world champion athlete, he’s the author of “The Carnivore Diet” and co-founder of the online clinic Revero.
“A lot of our food has become very similar to recreational drugs in the way we use and abuse them,” he says.
Eating a lot of addictive, ultra-processed food—high in carbs, sugars, and seed oils—drives inflammation and can lead to obesity, diabetes, arthritis, cardiovascular problems, gut malfunction, depression, and cancers, he explains.
In our in-depth interview, he explains how and why the adoption of low-carb, high-fat diets reduces inflammation and can even reverse chronic diseases such as diabetes and cardiometabolic disease.
There is even significant evidence that such diets can be used therapeutically for neurological and mental health issues, he says.
One of those low-carb, high-fat diets is the ketogenic diet. But what happens when you take keto one step further and go on the carnivore diet?
“Carnivore is basically a diet consisting primarily of animal products. So it would be meat. It would be fish. It would be eggs. It would be dairy products,” he says. This means no plant products at all.
The carnivore diet is not for everyone, but many people suffering from debilitating autoimmune diseases have healed themselves with such a diet, he says. Mikhaila Peterson has famously documented her transformative experience on an even more restricted version of this diet called the “lion diet.”
In our in-depth interview, we discuss many more questions regarding food as medicine and the benefits of a protein-heavy diet, including:
- Why people on ketogenic or carnivore diets experience something called ‘keto calm’ or ‘zero carb zen.’
- Why going on the carnivore diet does not harm your nutritional intake, contrary to what many may think.
- Why such diets can help reverse inflammatory bowel disease, Tourette syndrome, and hypermobility, also known as Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.
It’s time for Americans to stop simply relying on America’s “disease management system” of drugs and pharmaceuticals, he argues, and instead take their health into their own hands.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

A typical vaccine stimulates a person’s immune system, yet only a portion of the immune response actually targets the disease it’s designed to protect against. However, a new technology may be changing that dynamic.
In this episode, I sit down with Lou Reese, an entrepreneur who has led or co-founded several biotech companies and has been working on synthetic peptide-based active immunotherapy medicines. He’s co-CEO of United Biomedical and co-founder of Vaxxinity, Cana Life, and Axxium.
He’s working on a product that could—if proven successful—transform our approach to treating and preventing Alzheimer’s. He and his team also have a product that has shown preliminary promise in phase 1 trials in treating Parkinson’s.
In this episode, he also reveals an incredible story: He and his team previously developed a peptide-based active immunotherapy vaccine candidate for COVID-19, and they successfully completed Phase 1 and Phase 2 trials. Institutional backing, however, favored Pfizer and Moderna. In 2022, Lou Reese’s team was invited to the White House “Summit on the Future of COVID‑19 Vaccines,” where they presented their candidate as an alternative to Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine, which by then had been associated with serious side effects.
In the end, their product was never approved, and related content on YouTube was marked as misinformation.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

An estimated one in six American adults today are taking some form of psychiatric medication. Yet it seems mental health outcomes across America have seen no significant improvement, despite the promises of the psychopharmacology revolution.
David Cohen, professor of social welfare and associate dean at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs, argues that many of the core assumptions of modern psychiatry are flawed.
Cohen is known for his research on psychotropic drugs and coercive mental health treatment.
In our interview, we also discuss why it is that America has one of the highest involuntary mental hospitalization rates in Western countries, and what it means that suicide rates are exceedingly high among people who were just released from a mental hospital.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

“Minnesota … is just the tip of the iceberg,” says Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
Minnesota has become the epicenter of several overlapping fraud investigations of childcare programs, small business pandemic loans, and Medicaid services. Earlier this month, Dr. Oz traveled to Minnesota to tour suspected fraud sites and meet with whistleblowers and announced that over $2 billion in annual Medicaid funding might be withheld.
“What we’re seeing in Minnesota, which is billions of dollars of fraud that hurts our most vulnerable people and puts them at risk … is dwarfed by what I saw in California, which is whole-scale cultural malfeasance around health care,” Dr. Oz says.
“The magnitude of fraud there, we believe, is approximating $4 billion just in hospice and home health care,” he says.
Dr. Oz oversees programs that together constitute about one-fourth of the entire U.S. federal budget.
In this episode, he breaks down how the home health care and hospice systems are being exploited on a massive scale and also how Medicare beneficiary numbers are being stolen and weaponized for fraudulent billing schemes.
As the administration approaches its one‑year mark, he reflects on efforts to cut waste, lower drug prices, and transform health in America.
President Donald Trump has recently unveiled his new “Great Healthcare Plan” to lower prices and increase transparency.
“For decades, Americans have been paying three times more than Europeans and other developed nations have been paying for the exact same drugs made in the same facilities,” Dr. Oz says.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

One of the first executive orders President Donald Trump signed after his inauguration last January was titled “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.” The order directed the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to produce a systematic review of pediatric transgender procedures and their impact on children within 90 days.
In May 2025, HHS published a more than 400-page review, titled “Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices.” In November last year, an updated, peer-reviewed version was published with additional appendices and supplements.
Leor Sapir, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is one of the report’s main outside co-authors. In our in-depth interview, Sapir provides a detailed overview of the review’s findings and conclusions.
“We tried to be as factual and defensible as we possibly could,” he said.
The goal of the report, he says, is to “engage with people in the medical profession who may not be aligned with the administration, but who do care about questions of medical evidence and medical ethics.”
In this episode, he breaks down:
- The prevalence of sex-changing procedures in the United States, as well as the reversal in approaches in various Scandinavian countries and in the UK.
- How misleading and unscientific language was used by professionals across many fields to promote pediatric sex transitioning.
- The role of the organization, World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), in establishing “gender-affirming care” as the accepted standard.
- How clinicians, in his view, distorted the principle of patient autonomy to increase pediatric sex change surgeries.
There is one chapter in the report that everyone should read, Sapir said. And that is the chapter about ethics.
“The question on everybody’s mind is: Should we do it? That’s an ethical question. And medical ethics is, you would hope, [what] governs the field of medicine,” he told me.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.