(Natural News)—In a powerful roundtable discussion hosted by Senator Ron Johnson, health experts issued stark warnings about the prevailing narratives surrounding nutrition and chronic diseases in the United States. The event, titled “American Health and Nutrition: A Second Opinion,” aimed to explore critical questions that have long been dismissed or overlooked.
One of the main organizers of the event – Calley Means – urged the Senate to rethink nutritional guidance and distrust almost every institution.
America’s institutions have lied to the public for decades, misleading people on nutrition, healing from chronic illness
Means, a former consultant for Big Food and Big Pharma, emphasized the need for skepticism regarding the advice offered by major institutions on nutrition and chronic diseases. “Life expectancy has not increased in the past century, and we spend 90 to 95% of all medical spending on chronic issues, yet outcomes remain stagnant,” Means stated.
Means highlighted alarming trends, noting, “Heart disease has risen with increased statin prescriptions. Type 2 diabetes has surged alongside metformin use, and ADHD diagnoses have also climbed as more Adderall is prescribed.” He further pointed out that rising rates of depression and suicide correlate with increased prescriptions of antidepressants, while opioid prescriptions have led to greater pain management challenges.
Means criticized the American food system, describing it as “weaponized” due to the influence of the processed food industry. He traced its origins back to the tobacco industry, stating that major cigarette companies strategically acquired food brands and applied their expertise in creating addictive products. “They moved addiction specialists into their food divisions, creating ultra-processed foods designed to be both palatable and addictive,” he explained. Food chemicals such as MSG are used to addict consumers to toxic food-like products that are void of nutrition. Consumers get accustomed to eating ultra-processed foods that do not provide their cells what’s necessary to carry out vital functions.
Means asserted that the standard American diet has not only contributed to public health crises but has also been financially beneficial for the healthcare industry, which profits from treating the chronic conditions stemming from poor nutrition. “The medical industry has been complicit in this issue, benefiting from the rise in chronic diseases,” Means added. It’s true: most of the new drugs manufactured today do not address the root cause of chronic disease. Many of the new drugs actually cause new health problems.
Ultra-processed, food-like items have replaced raw living foods and herbs that people need to thrive
Max Lugavere, a best-selling author and long-time advocate for nutritional awareness, echoed these sentiments. He warned that many items in grocery stores should not be considered food but rather “food-like items” that contribute to an obesity epidemic. “This isn’t just about willpower; it’s about our food system,” Lugavere asserted. He concluded with a poignant observation: “We are not simply living longer; we are dying longer, plagued by preventable illnesses.”
The discussions at the Senate roundtable were deeply distrustful of government guidelines like the USDA’s food pyramid, which ignores essential food groups such as herbs, seeds, roots, barks, berries, seaweeds and healthy fats, to name a few. As health education is dumbed down in school systems and in medical schools, there is growing concern about the effectiveness of current nutritional guidance and chronic disease management strategies. As chronic diseases surface, individuals are finding their own way out of these health struggles by researching and implementing holistic strategies that are dismissed by traditional allopathic doctors — most of which are not trained on nutrition and herbal medicine.
As the panelists called for a re-evaluation of institutional advice, they highlighted the urgent need for systemic change in America’s approach to health and nutrition. Food pantries are void of the raw, living foods, nutrient-dense superfoods, adaptogenic substances and medicinal herbs that can set people free from their chronic diseases.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
Anyone who read the SUSSMANN INDICTMENT from John Durham and his legal staff should have already figured this out long ago!?!?!?