Fitness expert and best-selling author Jillian Michaels took a blowtorch to the American healthcare system which she says has been rigged to sacrifice people “at the altar of corporate greed.”
Michaels was one of a panel of experts gathered by U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) who led a roundtable discussion titled, “American Health and Nutrition: A Second Opinion.”
Michaels joined Dr. Jordan Peterson, Max Lugavere, and Casey and Calley Means, among others, as well as co-host Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to tackle the topic of “changes that have occurred over the last century within public sanitation, agriculture, food processing, and healthcare industries which impact the current state of national health.”
In her allotted time, Michaels delivered a blistering reality check on the nation’s state of healthcare and was rewarded with a standing ovation for her view of the chronic disease epidemic as “an extinction-level event.”
(Video Credit: Fox Live Now)
Michaels wondered “Where is the outrage” as she began her remarks, focusing on the number of obesity-related deaths in the nation that were “completely preventable.”
“I am a health advocate, a fitness expert, and a nutritionist. I have no political alliance because health transcends partisanship and ideology,” she said. “Unlike the majority of issues I imagine people in Washington contend with on a daily basis this one is not nuanced, it’s black and white, it’s right and wrong, it’s good against evil.”
She went on to note that in 1974, the year she was born, “less than 10% of our population was overweight or obese and prior to that, over the course of all human existence, being overweight or obese was considered extremely unusual and rare. And somehow they weren’t holding panels, by the way, nobody needed a panel to figure it out.”
The 50-year-old who starred on the NBC series “The Biggest Loser,” recounted how in the late 1970s, the U.S. population began to grow at “supersonic” levels, noting that she became clinically obese by the time she was 13, weighing 170 lbs.
“From the year I was born to the year I turned 21, obesity rates had tripled,” Michaels continued. “The entirety, almost, of my generation along with the two generations that followed have fallen victim to America’s unchecked obesity crisis.”
“I don’t know about you but I’ve watched my friends jabbing themselves every day with fertility drugs praying for a pregnancy. My friends getting up at the crack of dawn to get radiated where the lump was found in their breast. My friends swallowing fistfuls of pills to manage their debilitating anxiety and depression,” she told the House panel.
She argued that there was no “quantum leap” between the 1980s and the present in which “our DNA inexplicably mutated to make American bodies expand and fall ill at an unprecedented pace.”
“And while Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z have our problems, 75% of us are not stupid weak or lazy, so hopefully you are wondering what has happened to us,” Michales said, going on to contend that a “sinister series of events” converged in the late’ 70s and the early 80s that forced a shift in the food Americans consumed and, subsequently their health.
Calling it a “plague that crept like a fog while we slept,” Michaels showed how Americans were duped, “blindly trusting that the powers that be would never betray us.”
“It seemed unthinkable to question whether a corporation would poison us for profit… it was this betrayal of trust that allowed them to insidiously infiltrate every part of our lives,” she said in her impassioned remarks.
Michaels wrapped up her powerful speech by telling lawmakers that they need to step up and speak up for Americans suffering under corporate greed.
“If this current trend is allowed to persist the stakes will be untenable. We are in the middle of an extinction-level event. The American people need help, they need heroes and people of Washington, your constituents chose you to be their champion,” she concluded. “Please be the change.”
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