Caustic Commentary, Summer 2026

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Sally Fallon Morell takes on the Diet Dictocrats

START YOUNGER AND GET IT LOWER

The cardiologists are at it again, with new guidelines urging Americans to get their LDL-cholesterol as low as possible. New recommendations from the American Heart Association, the American College of Cardiology and nine other professional organizations especially target young people, to get them on cholesterol-lowering drugs as young and for as long as possible. “We think we could cut heart attack and stroke rates down by half,” gushes Dr. Roger Blumenthal, a cardiologist at Johns Hopkins Medical School. The guidelines call for testing LDL-cholesterol as early as age ten—can’t get them worried about heart disease too young!—and screening every five years starting around ages eighteen to twenty. Then these young people get a prescription for a statin or other cholesterol-lowering drug to get their levels down, and of course make it very hard for them to produce sex hormones during their reproductive years. Dr. Leslie Cho, a cardiologist who “consults” with makers of statin drugs, has no doubts: “If it is high, we would treat your LDL very aggressively.” Really? All of this ignores current research, such as a 2026 finding by Omar Ahmed and others in the Journal of the American Heart Association (and not mentioned in the abstract) which showed that all-cause mortality with statin use was highest in the group with the lowest LDL; or stud­ies showing that statins deplete CoQ10 and vitamin K2, both needed for healthy heart function (Epoch Times, July 22, 2025); or that statins aggravate insulin resistance, thereby increasing the risk for diabetes (J Cell Metabolism, February 6, 2024). Of course, none of these subtleties will be explained to patients whose doctors are treating LDL “very aggressively.”

PROTEIN POWDER GARBAGE

Fifteen years ago, exhibitors at the huge Natural Foods Expo were touting soy as the food of the future—soy milk, soy bars, soy burgers and soy powders. No one is promoting them now. Toxic soy has disappeared from supermarket shelves in a fitting demise for a thoroughly bad idea. The new Expo product is protein—protein powders, protein drinks, protein meal replacements, protein added to cereals and snacks. For example, a startup called Huel (for “human-fuel”) produces plant-based meals, snacks, drinks and food supplements derived from oats, rice protein, pea protein, sunflower, flaxseed, coconut oil MCTs, vitamins and minerals, and sweetened with sucralose or stevia. The company also produces a greens powder supplement “containing an­tioxidants, phytonutrients, adaptogens and plant-based proteins through 91 vitamins, minerals and whole food-sourced ingredients.” These products—popular with the gym set—are touted as “complete meal replacements.” The British company had revenues of over three hun­dred million dollars last year and has just completed a deal with Danone for its purchase at over one billion dollars. Will the sales last for Danone? Online Huel forums contain threads of people complaining about stomach pains, flatulence and heartburn; and excess protein, particularly processed protein from foods like peas and oats, poses multiple health dangers, including vitamin A deficiency, immune dysfunction and kidney problems. No matter what happens with Danone in charge, the Huel founders are sitting pretty and will now be able to afford to eat real food like caviar and foie gras.

WE CAN BELIEVE IT’S NOT BUTTER

Another new startup, called Savor, is producing a syn­thetic “butter” from carbon dioxide and hydrogen. Why do we need such a product? Because “the entire process releases zero greenhouse gases, uses no farmland to feed cows, and despite its industrial appearance, has a significantly smaller footprint and. . . the land footprint is a thousand times lower than what you need in tradi­tional agriculture,” say spokespersons for the company. “Of the 51 billion tons of greenhouse gases emitted every year, 7% is from the production of fats and oils from animals and plants, which Savor says makes their process the most climate-friendly option.” (No reference is given for these numbers.) Savor is proud of the fact that the product contains just a few ingredients: lab-created fat, water, an emulsifier, beta-carotene for color and rosemary oil for flavor, claiming that “it tastes like butter.” But the real question is, what does this ersatz product not contain? It does not contain fat-soluble vita­mins A, D, E and K2, nor gut-healing arachidonic acid, nor thyroid-supporting butyric acid, nor anti-cancer CLA, nor a host of other special compounds that butter provides. The company is marketing first to restaurants, and putting the fake butter in products like chocolates, before trying it out on supermarket shoppers. And the startup, financially supported by Bill Gates, still has a few challenges, such as getting regulatory approval in the United States (so they can call it “butter”) and reducing the price to make it affordable. We’ll be happy to see synthetic “butter” go the way of the dodo bird.

BREASTFEEDING BETTER FOR PREEMIES

Parents of premature babies often get advice to bottle-feed their babies, with nurses arguing that bottle feed­ing is “easier” for preemies than breastfeeding. But a recent randomized controlled trial published in 2025 in the Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutri­tion found otherwise. Compared to bottle-fed babies, those who were breastfed had better oxygen saturation and a lower heart rate. They also took more milk! The conclusion: “Preterm infants whose oral feeding was initiated by breastfeeding with their mothers showed more favorable physiological responses and better feed­ing performance compared to those fed with a bottle.”

THE BUNDIBUGYO VIRUS OR 5G?

Scientists are working feverishly to test and produce a vaccine for the not-making-this-name-up Bundibugyo virus, said to be the cause of the Ebola outbreak that is raging in Congo—and reported in the newspapers with photos of people in masks and hazmat suits. Accord­ing to the Oxford Vaccine Group, “Viral seed. . . will allow us to rapidly inoculate our cell bank and begin producing vaccine doses in record time.” The vaccine will be produced in the same way as the AstraZeneca/ Oxford Covid-19 vaccine (Epoch Times, May 27-June 2). What could possibly go wrong? The virus theory has everybody looking in the wrong direction and ignoring the most probable cause of the illness occurring in the Congo: the rollout of 5G, launched in late 2024. How the virus theory is useful to justify the crimes of big pharma and cover up dangers of the telecom industry!

COINCIDENCE?

Forrest Maready, author of The Moth in the Iron Lung and a new book called The Autism Vaccine has made an alarming discovery. The first autistic child was diag­nosed in the U.S. in 1932, the same year that aluminum was first added to vaccines, namely to the diphtheria vaccine. Before that year, only a few cases exist in the scientific literature of children with a diagnosis resem­bling the modern diagnosis of autism. But after that, the famous child Baltimore psychiatrist Leo Kanner began to see children—mostly boys—with strange behaviors he had never seen before. Coincidence? Perhaps, but it just so happens that one other country began adding aluminum to vaccines; that was Austria, also in the 1930s. After that, another famous child psychiatrist, Hans Asperger, began seeing children with strange behavior patterns. He described more than two hundred children—again, all boys—with the same symptoms that were described by Leo Kanner in Baltimore. Both countries had nationwide vaccination campaigns in the early 1930s. Coincidence? We think not (x.com/ stkirsch)!

NOT BELIEVING THE SCIENCE

“A ‘staggering’ number of people believe unproven claims about vaccines, raw milk and more.” So ran the headline of an article at nature.com (April 22, 2026) by Cambridge-educated British science journalist Helen Pearson. Referring to a recent survey, Pearson reports that “More than two-thirds of the public believe at least one false or unproven health claim,” such as “the risk of childhood vaccinations outweighs benefits,” or “fluoride in water is harmful,” or “raw milk is healthier than pasteurized.” People also believed that “taking paracetamol [Tylenol] during pregnancy causes au­tism.” The survey included more than sixteen thousand people in sixteen countries and found that a total of 70 percent of respondents believed at least one of the “claims.” According to David Bersoff, head of research at the Edelman Trust Institute, which carried out the survey, the result “blows the lid off” the idea that such beliefs are held by only a “fringe population of individu­als who are uninformed or ideologically driven.” People who believed three or more of the claims were as likely to have attended university and more likely to consume health news than were those who believed fewer of them. Says Bersoff, “This challenges the assumption that people who hold such views are ill-informed.” Ber­soff blames “too much information available to know what is true about science,” from social media, news and peers in real life. In other words, the monopoly on information no longer holds and once people become well informed, they are no longer likely to believe the propaganda spewing from the scientific establishment.

DNA TESTING AT BIRTH

“In Pioneering Study, Gene Technology Outperforms Standard Newborn Screening Tests.” This was the headline at the Columbia University Medical Center website (October 24, 2024) reporting on results from a study of newborn screening methods—called GUARD­IAN—which “show that DNA analysis picks up many more preventable or treatable serious health conditions than standard newborn screening. . ..” Among the first four thousand newborns enrolled, researchers used genome sequencing to identify one hundred twenty babies (3 percent) with “serious health conditions, only 10 of whom were identified with standard newborn screening.” In other words, using DNA analysis, they found a lot more babies they could “treat.” Promoters are enthusiastic about this magic wand, which they assume to be gold standard science and 100 percent accurate. But if you are testing for thousands of genes associated with illness, and you get even 5 percent false positives, virtually all babies could end up with a diagnosis of a genetic disease. Then what happens? The article tells us. For one child, “detecting a rare gene variant that causes a severe immunodeficiency disorder that was missed by conventional screening resulted in a lifesaving bone marrow transplant.” In other words, a perfectly healthy baby, who might in the future have an immunodeficien­cy disorder, was subjected to a horrendous operation before even leaving the hospital. How many babies will be subjected to such treatment—perhaps even without parental consent—if DNA testing becomes the norm?

RED MEAT: NOT GUILTY AS CHARGED

In a new study out of Sweden, published March 19, 2026 in JAMA Open Network, researchers looked at a group of patients said to have a genetic risk for dementia. They were surprised to find that high meat consump­tion was linked to a lower dementia risk in this group. “Older people with a genetic risk of Alzheimer’s disease did not experience the expected increase in cognitive decline and dementia risk if they consumed relatively large amounts of meat,” estimated at about two pounds of meat per week. In addition, they had a 15 percent reduction in all-cause mortality.

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