America is starving. It’s fat as hell but it’s starving. People talk about America’s increasing lack of state capacity. However, the crowning achievement of our modern ruling class has been its ability to endlessly expand the capacity of body fat around the world. Thanks to WWII-era subsidy regimes and subsequent industry-captured food guidelines, billions of humans around the planet are filled with an alien form of cold-temperature plant fat, called polyunsaturated fatty acids or PUFAs for short, that signals mammals to store fat, lowers their metabolic rate, and causes them to prepare for winter hibernation all year long. In engineering an epidemic of clinically-undetected low thyroid function in its population, the American government has created an environment where once gregarious neighbors are increasingly serotonin-soaked, hormonally-broken rivals fixated on each other’s destruction rather than win-win solutions. SSRIs and other Big Pharma cash cows have subsequently poured gasoline on the inflammatory state of the body politic, further driving us to the brink of societal collapse.

Welcome to the world predicted by the late biologist and nutritional dissident, Ray Peat. I got to know this man through my radio broadcasts, podcasts, and private discussions with him towards the end of his life and what I learned will reorient the very fabric of our society once the public grasps its truth.

Politics is downstream from thyroid. “The crowd is a lie,” Søren Kierkegaard said. The art of statecraft is the ability to manage the madness of crowds. In a crowd, we tend to become possessed by contagious desires around us, literally picking up—resonance—vibes of aggression emitted around us whether at a sporting event or a charged political rally. Much of this social unrest is driven by a cascade of stress hormones attempting to manage chronic inflammation caused by environmental toxins. Dr. Ray Peat, through decades of newsletters and online articles, educated an underground following of folks fed up with our medical system’s inability to treat the root of diseases rather than mask symptoms.

Like any fandom or group with insight against the social elites, the human tendency to create tribalism or personality cult certainly can show up from time to time in such circles, but such tendencies are universal and have no real bearing on the truth of the claims Peat shared, except to the extent that radical truth can breed radical loyalty and devotion in people surrounded by fakeness and lies. Ask fans of another R.P., Ron Paul, who seventeen years ago hung up banners on overpasses of his warnings about the FBI, CIA, inflation, surveillance, medical coercion, and endless wars. And then look around you.

Unlike so many grifters, diet gurus, and supplement salesmen of the online world, I saw in Ray Peat, a true detective of biology and matter itself, a renaissance man endlessly fascinated with the way the world actually works rather than how people perceived him. Unlike fly-by-night influencers looking to promote a book or use a program appearance as a stepping stone to get to a larger show, Ray Peat would spend quite some time on phone calls with me privately helping me address health issues. Even near the end of his own life. No one was looking. No book was pushed. No dollar accepted. All the while thousands of other refugees from dietary ideologies and the US nutrition guidelines were pouring into his inbox.

It is important to note here that the problem is not just the US food pyramid which has wrecked our health but also the endless health foods and dietary trends—from plant-based to keto—that have contributed to people’s malnourished and metabolically broken health. The establishment system—with its artificially cheap toxic seed oils and adulterated grains—has done the heavy lifting of creating the epidemic of so-called “diseases of civilization”—heart disease, obesity, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and strokes. However, like any false dialectic—many well-meaning ideologies and conmen have sprung up in the gap to provide false solutions to the underlying metabolic dysfunction underlying all of these diseases.

Ray Peat’s initial study as a biologist was progesterone and estrogen, and the conclusions of his insights into those molecules based on his study of science both in Western literature and Russian sources upended the conventional notions of what both actually do in men and women. However, his main focus of the root of our 20^th century metabolic collapse centered on the thyroid. This gland, a master regulator of our energy, has been dramatically impaired by the over-consumption of the aforementioned PUFAs, primarily through industrial seed oils. As one of the first to pioneer this subject to mainstream broadcast audiences on radio almost a decade ago, I take the negative health effects of seed oils quite seriously. The memes that have subsequently spread on social media have been a boon and a curse—exploding awareness of their harm exponentially but also pigeon-holing the topic as another ironic fad or political statement.

Seed oil-consumption is the elephant in the room of our metabolic dysfunction. Seed oils signal to our bodies that winter is perpetually coming, which induces overeating and storage of excess fat while also producing depression and other low-energy malfunctions of the human mind. When burned for fuel, they release charged unstable molecules that damage our organs. Several decades before our present online seed-oil discourse, Ray Peat was the lone voice in the wilderness of scholarship sounding the alarm of their horrific effects on our bodies and minds. The proportion of mimetic groupthink to corrupted industry influence on seed oils’ promotion by academia is hard to assess. Peat told me that in the late 80s a faculty member was fired for scheduling Peat to talk to students about the ways in which excess PUFA consumption is harmful.

Seed oils and to a lesser but significant extent, other US government-subsidized toxins we ingest like adulterated grains, rancid fish oil, glyphosate, micro-plastics, psychotropic drugs, and processed food additives all contribute to the massive rise in mental illnesses such as neuroses, despondency, bipolar disorder, and antisocial, pathological behaviors. They have been shown to lower IQ in infants fed formula mandated by the government to contain such oils. Such foods when fried create such harmful poisons that they induce a living slow, painful death filled with mental stupor. The image of Colonel Sanders erected in a town becomes a kind buzzard-like emblem of artificially accelerated decay.

Populations in a state of malnutrition, chronic pain, and mental affliction abandon hope and transcendence in exchange for safety and the fleeting illusion of control via political proxy punishment. Ray Peat was an anti-authoritarian and his solutions to healing mind and body reflect it.

Time-tested, affordable working-class staples like milk, orange juice, white button mushrooms, a daily carrot, collagen-rich soups, weekly beef liver, aspirin are all approachable, yet powerful tools Peat suggests people can use to heal their thyroid, reduce inflammation, and increase the “fountain of youth” progesterone. Rejecting the obsession with weight-loss at all costs is another pillar of Peat’s biological principles. The average American daily caloric intake is roughly half what it used to be in the first half of the 20^th century while the average caloric expenditure has actually increased. Long-term caloric restriction and over-exercise actually contribute to the chronically stressed metabolic state most Americans are in. Peat recommends walking, moderate anaerobic exercise, and doing pleasurable activities that delight as the best form of exercise.

When we are born, our thyroids are strong and our progesterone abundant. Joy is our default state of being. As we get older, we allow bullies and then demagogues to draw us into rivalries and stressful states of being. We listen to dietary frauds who shape food policies afloat by the prestige of power rather than facts. We impair our thyroids with seed oils. This is the road to serfdom. Tyranny thrives in a sea of serotonin. Yet our birthright is freedom. Our bodies belong to us. Our minds belong to us. Reclaiming our nation starts with reclaiming our metabolic sovereignty. It requires careful discernment to avoid reductive dietary ideologies. When we heal our energy, we will fling tyrants off like gnats in a summer wind.