How Big Food & Big Pharma are conspiring to keep you sick and fat.

What if I told you that the reason you’ve struggled to lose weight and get healthy is NOT because there’s something wrong with you, or because you’re over 40 and your metabolism has stopped working, or because you’re weak and lack the willpower to actually make the necessary changes in your life.

What if told you it was something bigger than that?

Something a LOT more sinister?

What if I told you that the reason you’ve probably struggled—maybe even your whole life—is because the food industry and the pharmaceutical industry have literally been conspiring against you.

They want you sick and fat, because that is what’s in their best interest, not yours.

And they’re very, very good at what they do.

I’m just going to warn you right now that this post is going to be long, and it’s probably going to be controversial, because the reality is that there are a lot of people who don’t want us to be talking about it.

But frankly, it’s time to be honest about what’s really going on.

First, though, if we haven’t met before, my name is Ruth Soukup. And no, I’m not some crazy conspiracy theorist. I am the founder of Thinlicious and the creator of the Thin Adapted System, as well as the New York Times bestselling author of 7 books.

I am also a 40-something year old woman who has struggled to lose weight and get healthy.

It was a battle I fought for so many years, constantly trying everything I knew how to do–everything the so-called experts told me to do–to lose weight and get healthy. I tried almost every diet out there, one after another, sometimes losing a few pounds, but then always gaining it right back.

The only thing I didn’t try was Ozempic, but that’s only because it wasn’t around yet! But believe me, had it been available, I probably would have been first in line.

Because honestly, I was so desperate to fix that piece of my life. 

And if you landed on this website because you too are struggling with this, then you probably know exactly what I’m talking about. You understand exactly how not feeling good about your body or about the way that you look or feel starts to impact everything else in your life.

It’s hard to feel good in your clothes. You’re always self-conscious and self critical. You start avoiding pictures or even wanting to look in the mirror. You start saying no. You begin to hide from the world. It basically starts eroding your confidence and your life.

And on top of that, you just don’t feel good. You’re tired all the time. You feel bloated and gassy. You struggle with heartburn and indigestion, or sometimes even chronic pain and headaches and inflammation.

It becomes a vicious cycle. It’s hard to get motivated to do something about it because you’re just exhausted all the time, but there’s no way to stop feeling exhausted unless you actually change something.

Believe me, I get it.

And for me, it wasn’t until I decided to take a totally different approach that things finally turned around. The biggest thing was that I finally stopped looking for a quick fix, another crash diet, and instead decided to do some real research into the science of weight loss, and into why we gain weight in the first place.

And honestly, what I discovered shocked me because it was so different than everything we’ve ever been told about what’s healthy and not healthy, and what makes us lose weight and what makes us gain it. 

Our whole lives we’ve been told to eat less and exercise more, and that weight loss is just calories in and calories out, but that’s not true. Not even a little bit. Especially for women, and especially for women over 40.

Because as it turns out, the thing that regulates our weight isn’t actually calories, it’s hormones.

And so, as I started to change the way I eat in a way that restored balance to my hormones and reversed insulin resistance and healed my gut, the weight just started to come off.

Without dieting. Without drugs. And without making myself miserable.

I lost 40 pounds in six months, and for the first time ever in my adult life, I didn’t just gain it all right back. And I’ve easily maintained that weight loss for years now.

And let me tell you friend, after struggling with this part of my life for so long, it felt—and still does feel—like FREEDOM.

It’s why I’m SO incredibly passionate about this work. It’s why I started Thinlicious, and why I record my podcast every week. Because I can’t help but want to share it, and to help other women find that same freedom.

But it has also unlocked a passion inside of me to really get to the truth of what’s actually going on, and exactly WHY so many of us are struggling with this exact same thing. 

And honestly it’s a little bit like going down the rabbit hole. You just start to go deeper and deeper, and you start seeing all these connections and you start to realize that it’s not just your experience. 

There’s actually something much bigger going on.

And so that’s sort-of where I’m at.

I feel like there’s all these things that I haven’t quite dared to just come out and say and be totally blunt.

Honestly it’s a little bit scary, I think, especially in this day and age.

You have to be so careful about what you say.

What if people call me crazy?

What if big food and big pharma, and the powers behind them come after me because they don’t like what I have to say?

What if I get censored or blacklisted or canceled or shut down?

And frankly, the threat of that has always been enough to hold me back a little bit.

After all, this business is my livelihood. It’s how I support my whole family. There’s a whole team of people who work for me who count on this business too.

But I can’t hold it back anymore. 

I can’t not talk about this because frankly it’s too big. It’s too important. It’s too intricately related to the very thing I’m trying to help people with, which is to lose weight and get healthy by actually healing your body from the inside out.

And in order to really do that, you need to understand just what the forces are that have been conspiring against you for basically your whole life.

Big Food and Big Pharma.

Because the deeper you go, the more you realize that it’s very intentional.

They want us to be sick. They want us to be fat.

Because that’s how they make all their money.

And not only that, they are paying off all the people that should be protecting us and advocating for us.

The doctors. The medical schools. The government agencies. The media.

There’s no one standing up for US, for YOU and for ME.

There’s no one to stand in the gap and say wait a minute, this is B.S.

They’re literally killing us slowly and no one’s doing anything about it.

And I think that’s the really, really scary part.

But knowledge is power. And once you see it and understand what’s actually happening, that’s when you have the power to do something about it.

So let’s break it down, okay? Here’s how the rest of this article is going to go:

• First I’m going to talk about Big Food and how they’ve very intentionally created this monster of an obesity epidemic unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
• Second, I’m going to talk about Big Pharma, and how their so-called solutions and cures only make the problem worse.
• Third, I’m going to talk about the money trail—basically the corruption and greed that is at the heart of all of this, and how it all connects together.
• And finally, I’m going to talk about the solution—what we can actually do about it. Because as scary as all this stuff is, I refuse to believe that we are powerless.

Big Food’s Big Lies

So first up, there’s the food industry—AKA Big Food. And most people don’t realize that this isn’t just some cute name or catch phrase. 

When I say Big Food, I’m talking about a TRILLION dollar industry that has absolute control over the global food supply. It controls what gets grown and what gets harvested and what gets processed and what gets packaged and what gets distributed and what gets sold in every single grocery store and market in the world. It controls what you eat, and it’s probably controlling what you THINK about what you eat as well.

And not only that, I’m not talking about thousands of different companies. I’m talking about TEN. There are 10 massive food conglomerates that control more than 90% of the food that you see in the grocery store. Nestlé, Pepsico, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Danone, General Mills, Kellogg’s, Mars, Associated British Foods, and Mondelez.

That’s it.

So just right there, think about the power that comes from controlling basically all of the world’s food.

And ultimately, what is every company’s goal? 

To make more money and higher profits, right?

So right away you have to realize that the interests of the food companies are not in line with your interests.

They want you to buy as much as possible, which means they want you to eat as much as possible, which means it is in their best interest to make their food as addictive as possible. And believe me, they’re working very hard at making their food as addictive as possible, with whole teams of scientists dedicated to ensuring that you truly “can’t eat just one.”

On top of that, they want to be able to produce their food as cheaply as possible, which means using ingredients that can be mass produced as inexpensively as possible, which usually means things like ultra-processed chemicals and high-fructose corn syrup. Because the closer it is to nature, the more expensive it is. But the more fillers and chemicals they can add, the cheaper it is to produce.

And you would think that this would be pretty obvious to all of us, that all this highly processed food and artificial stuff can’t possibly be good for our health or for our waistlines. That eating real food—real fruits and vegetables and meat and dairy—is always going to be so much better for us than eating all that junk.

Well, I think at first it was obvious. People didn’t buy it right away.

And that’s why the food industry had to get creative, and they had to start controlling the narrative. Basically they started lying to us.

Big Lie #1: Fat is Bad

These lies started way back in the 1960’s–more than 50 years ago now–first with the sugar industry, when they secretly funded a number of studies intended to downplay the risk of sugar while blaming coronary heart disease on FAT. You can read all about that here. And HERE!

This kicked off a huge backlash against saturated fat, and surprise surprise, this created an instant demand for highly processed vegetable and seed oils—things like Crisco, vegetable oil, and margarine.

Because up to this point, even though those products existed, people weren’t really sold on them. Butter and lard were still used for cooking.

And then this fake study—directly funded and orchestrated by the food industry—became the big thing, and the American Heart Association—also largely influenced by special interest lobbyists who are funded by—you guessed it—the food industry became the gold standard for what to eat and what not to eat.

Butter and lard were bad.

Carbohydrates and vegetable oils were good.

The messaging was everywhere. It’s what began to be taught in medical schools, and still is to this day.

And it fundamentally changed the way we ate.

In fact, if you go back and look at the recommended dietary guidelines from the 1970s—which were developed by a committee that was heavily influenced by the food industry—you’ll see that this is exactly what happened. 

This is when we started to see a massive increase in the consumption of processed carbohydrates—sugar, white flour, and other highly refined grain products. It’s when we started to see the introduction of low-fat and fat-free products in the grocery store.

And it’s also exactly when we started to see a massive increase in the rates of obesity and heart disease and type 2 diabetes.

Because the truth is that fat is not what is making us fat. It’s not what’s causing heart disease. And it’s not what’s causing all of these health problems that we’re seeing at epidemic levels around the world. 80% of adults are overweight in this country. 50% of teens are overweight.

And eating too much sugar and too many carbohydrates is what’s making us sick. It’s what’s making us fat. It’s what’s causing heart disease and type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome and high blood pressure and inflammation and a whole host of other health problems.

In fact, there is a growing body of evidence that shows that a diet high in carbohydrates and sugar and processed foods is the single biggest contributing factor to almost all of the chronic health problems we face today. It’s what’s making us sick. And the food industry knows it.

And yet, they continue to perpetuate the lie that FAT is bad. Because they know that if they can keep us eating a highly processed, carbohydrate-rich diet, then they’ll keep making money.

Big Lie #2: Processed Foods are Healthy

The second big lie that the food industry wants us to believe is that processed foods are healthy, and that all of these low-fat and fat-free products they’ve been selling us for years are somehow good for us. They want us to believe that it’s better to eat processed food full of chemicals and preservatives and artificial ingredients, than it is to eat whole, natural foods that might actually contain some fat.

And honestly, this is a lie that is SO insidious, because it’s not always something that is actually SAID. It’s not like you see a commercial for Twinkies with a voiceover that says, “Twinkies. Because it’s healthier than eating an avocado.” It’s not that overt.

But it’s everywhere. It’s in the packaging and labeling of products. It’s in all the buzzwords and the claims that a product is “heart healthy.” It’s in the way that certain products are displayed in grocery stores so that they look like they’re the healthier option. It’s in the way that food manufacturers use marketing and psychology to make us believe that their products are good for us, even when they’re not.

And we fall for it, over and over again, because we’re busy and we’re tired and we’re overwhelmed and we want to believe that there is an easier way. We want to believe that we can just keep eating the same foods we’ve always eaten, because they’re healthy, right? They’re good for us.

But the truth is, almost all of the food in the grocery store—especially the food in the middle aisles of the grocery store—is highly processed and full of chemicals and preservatives and artificial ingredients. Almost all of it is really bad for us. And the food industry knows it.

But they don’t care. Because like I said, processed foods are cheap to produce. They’re easy to make. They’re easy to package. They have a long shelf life. And they’re easy to sell. And they’re super profitable.

But it’s not just the money. The food industry has actually invested billions of dollars in research and development, and in understanding human behavior and psychology, and in developing products that are literally addictive. They’ve created the perfect storm of chemicals and ingredients that make it almost impossible for us to resist. They know what they’re doing. They know that if they can get us hooked on their processed foods, then we’ll keep buying them, over and over again.

And that’s exactly what’s happening.

Did you know that the average American now gets 60% of their daily calories from highly processed foods? Sixty percent! And that’s not even the worst of it. Because it’s not just the adults who are eating this way, but our kids too. In fact, the biggest consumers of processed foods are our teenagers.

And that’s why we’re seeing a massive increase in childhood obesity and type 2 diabetes and all of these health problems that used to only affect adults.

It’s heartbreaking. And it makes me so angry. Because these companies know what they’re doing. They know that they’re destroying our health. And they don’t care. As long as they can keep making money.

And there’s probably a LOT more I could say about the food industry and all the underhanded things they’re doing to make sure we keep eating a steady stream of their garbage.

But the Food Industry is only half of the problem—it’s the half that MAKES us sick.

But Big Pharma is the half that KEEPS us sick.

Big Pharma’s Big Agenda

And I guess we’re already halfway down this rabbit hole so we might as well just keep on going, right?

And it’s hard to know where to even start with this, but I liked the way that Calley Means put it in a recent interview with Tucker Carlson.

He said, “if the fish tank is dirty, you clean the fish tank, you don’t drug the fish.”

And that in a nutshell is exactly what’s wrong with the pharmaceutical industry.

Their goal isn’t actually to HEAL us. 

They don’t want to clean the fish tank. They want to drug the fish.

Because just like the food industry, Big Pharma’s ultimate goal is more money and more profit.

And just like the food industry, the way they make more money is to get us to buy as much as possible, and to keep us buying, over and over and over again. Because drugs are cheap to produce, but expensive to develop. So the more we keep taking the SAME drugs over and over again—the more they can convince us we NEED to keep taking them, the more profit lands in their pockets.

Think about it. There is a direct conflict of interest in creating drugs that actually heal us, because then we won’t need them anymore.

If we’re healed, they stop making money. And they don’t want to stop making money.

So keeping us sick but masking the problem or just alleviating the symptoms, while the underlying condition goes unchecked is really the goal. How sick is that?

And if a drug causes side effects that in turn require more drugs to help alleviate, then that is almost like an added bonus. More drugs for everyone!

So let’s take Ozempic as an example and talk about that.

Because now Ozempic is everywhere, and everyone’s taking and everyone’s talking about it

And the doctors are pushing it like crazy, mostly because they’re being incentivized to push it like crazy.

Because Ozempic is basically the perfect drug, right? As it’s being prescribed, even to teenagers, you’re being told that it is a lifetime drug. You will need to take it for the rest of your life or you will gain the weight back.

Think about the money there is to be made providing a drug that 80% of the population could be on for life.

Because at the same time, the big message they’re putting out there is, “oh you don’t need to change what you eat. Why would you do that? Keep eating whatever you want. Just take Ozempic and it will fix the problem.”

But it doesn’t actually fix the problem.

It just creates more problems. And the side effects from Ozempic are severe and incredibly scary. It’s not even legal in other countries besides the US because it’s so dangerous.

It causes major gastrointestinal issues and stomach paralysis, and in some cases permanent stomach paralysis It’s also been shown to cause severe depression and suicidal thoughts, most likely because it messes with your digestive system and all of your serotonin—the chemical responsible for your mood regulation—is produced in your gut.

So you’re basically setting yourself up for a lifetime of dependency on a drug that makes you feel awful most of the time.

It makes me mad. Viscerally it makes me sick to my stomach to see this happening and to know what’s going on, but at the same time to also understand so well the misery and the desperation that so many women feel about this part of our lives, that we are willing to literally trade our well-being and happiness for the chance to be thin.

Because like I said, had Ozempic been around a few years ago, before I dove down this rabbit hole, I probably would have been first in line.

And I have many friends who have chosen that path and I have no judgment, because I really, really get it. And at the same time, I now realize that this is not the solution.

Big Food and Big Pharma have literally set us up for failure. We’re all caught in their trap.

And it’s not just Ozempic.

There are statins, which are terrible and basically useless, and yet prescribed to more than 45% of adults over the age of 50.

There are all the different antidepressants—now prescribed to almost 25% of adult women—that don’t actually cure depression.

And this one is personal to me too, because I’ve struggled with depression. In my early 20’s I almost died from it. I attempted suicide 5 times, and came very close to succeeding. 

And in those almost three years that I was in and out of psychiatric hospitals, I was prescribed so many different drugs, one after another after another. 

But do you know what no single doctor ever asked me in all those 3 years, even at the best, most prestigious psychiatric hospital in the country?

They never asked: What are you eating? What are you doing to take care of your body? How’s your gut health? Are you getting the right vitamins and nutrients?

And I can only speak for myself here, but I didn’t get better until I started taking care of my body. 

I stopped taking all the drugs and I started exercising and I got really into nutrition and cooking amazing healthy food for every meal. Granted I went vegan for a while, which I wouldn’t actually recommend, but looking back, I think the fact that I completely cut out all of the processed crap was actually a really big deal.

Suffice to say, I don’t believe that Big Pharma has your best interest at heart.

But buckle up, friend, because it gets WORSE.

The Money Trail

Because when you follow the money trail, you really start to see just how big and pervasive the problem is, and also why no one is actually talking about this, and why this article is probably going to get me censored or canceled or who knows what else.

Because if you’ve watched any of those movies that have come out recently about the opioid crisis—Pain Hustlers was one, and PainKiller was another one—you’ve seen a glimpse of what I’m talking about, but frankly I feel like both of those movies sort of missed the bigger picture.

Because yes, the opioid crisis has been awful and terrible and so, so devastating, and while both those movies do show a lot of the greed at the heart of the crisis, they focus more of the devastation of the opioids themselves without really recognizing that it wasn’t really about the TYPE of drug they were peddling,or the fact that it was an opioid.

Instead, it’s the way the whole industry is structured that promotes profit and greed above people’s well being.

We have a system in the United States where pharmaceutical companies through their drug reps heavily incentivize doctors—through perks and trips and overpaid speaking engagements—to prescribe more and more drugs. 

And if you think that’ was only happening with opioids, then you need to wake up. Why do you think Ozempic has suddenly exploded onto the scene, and why suddenly every doctor is handing it out like candy?

And the more drugs the doctors prescribe, the more the drug reps make, so the more they keep pushing. 

Everyone’s incentive is not helping YOU. It’s making more money.

And don’t misunderstand me here, because I’m not saying I think all doctors are evil, money-grubbing pill pushers. I don’t believe that. I also believe that at some point most doctors probably went to medical school because they wanted to help people.

The Hippocratic Oath that they still take says “first do no harm.”

But I do believe many doctors have been beaten down and brainwashed by a system that is rigged right from the start, and that the massive debt most of them incur while attending medical school makes them prime targets for financial temptation.

And speaking of medical schools, do you know who funds 70% of all medical school research in this country? The pharmaceutical companies. Do you know who literally writes the textbooks? The pharmaceutical companies.

Everyone is bought and paid for, but they don’t even realize it.

That’s just the way the system works. 

It’s a broken system that is totally stacked in Big Pharma’s favor.

And you know what they don’t teach in medical schools? Using food as medicine. Most doctors don’t get more than a few hours of nutrition training in all the years they attend school, and the very small amount of training they do get is still based on the flawed studies from the 1960’s that were bought and paid for by the sugar industry.

So the doctors either aren’t seeing it or they’re so caught up in the perks that come from going along with the system that they just look the other way.

So then you might ask, where’s the government in all of this? Isn’t it their job to protect the people? Don’t they care?

Sadly, no, not really, for a lot of the same reasons. 

Big Pharma and Big Food have very deep pockets, which means they can afford to pay lobbyists and special interests big money to create policies that feed the system. 

And if you look it up, you’ll see that the big pharmaceutical companies and big food companies are near the top of every list of lobbyists.

But then you might think, surely the media would raise hell about all of this right? Isn’t that what journalism is for? To expose corruption and greed, especially corruption and greed that is directly affecting the health of every single person in the country?

Well not so much.

And it’s easy to follow the money trail there too. 

In 2023, guess what industry spent the MOST money on media advertising?

Big Pharma.

And guess which industry was second?

I know you’re going to be shocked—it was Big Food.

So if you’ve ever wondered why almost every ad you see is either pushing some new drug or making you crave more of that crap processed food, you’re not imagining it.

Those two industries have pretty much obtained total control over our health.

Because it’s in their best interest to keep us sick and fat.

Are you starting to see the problem here? 

It runs so deep. It is so ingrained in the fabric of our society that feels almost impossible to escape.

And that’s why I also believe that if you have struggled with losing weight and getting healthy, it truly is not your fault. This whole system is rigged.

So what’s the solution?

What You Can Do About It

At the end of the day, I refuse to believe that we are powerless in all of this.

And I don’t know about you, but I also refuse to be a victim of a system that is stacked against me.

So the first thing I want to say is that the solution to all of this is actually really simple, at least when it comes to your health and to your own body. 

It’s to stop eating all the sugar and processed crap, and to start eating a diet rich in healthy fats and nutrient dense proteins.

This IS the answer. It IS the solution.

This is what will heal your body from the inside out—the thing that will balance your hormones and heal your gut and reverse your insulin resistance, which in turn will reduce inflammation and solve 99% of all those other weight-related health issues you’re dealing with. Without drugs. Without dieting. Without making yourself miserable.

But just because it is simple, doesn’t mean it’s always easy right? Because in theory it’s simple, but in practice there are all these factors working against you—a whole system that is actively working against you.

And that’s why I think having the right support is SO key. Because it can be hard to fight a system like this all on your own.

But I also think knowledge and understanding is the first step in changing the system.

We have to actually talk about this stuff, and say the quiet part out loud, and shine a light on what’s really going on. We have to be BOLD.

And I know it’s not easy. It took me a long time to actually publish this article.

But frankly it’s criminal. It’s abhorrent. And it is literally killing us.

80% of the adult population in the US is now overweight. 90% of the population has some form of Insulin resistance. Over 50% of the population is diabetic or pre-diabetic. We are dying from preventable diseases that are a direct result of the greed and corruption of a system that wants to keep you sick and fat. And even if we’re NOT dying, we’re not actually living either.

Our best years are being stolen from us because we don’t feel good.

And that’s bullshit. Yep, I said it.

So RISE UP. Start talking about it. Start by sharing this article with everyone you know. Shout it from the rooftops.

Because if enough people decide to stop buying into the system that is keeping us sick, if enough people are willing to say “wait a minute, NO.”

They will have to change. There are more of US than there are of them.

So welcome to the Health Revolution.

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. 

There’s no turning back now.

I know that was a lot, but I hope it gave some food for thought and honestly, I hope it made you angry enough to actually want to do something about it—at the very least to make changes to the way YOU are eating, but also to start speaking up.

So please start by SHARING this article with everyone you know. 

Let’s be brave together.

And honestly, I would love to continue this conversation so if you are not already part of our Health Rebel Facebook group, please consider joining HERE. And, if you are NEW to Thinlicious but you want more information about how our program works and WHY it works to help you lose weight and get healthy by balancing your hormones and reversing insulin resistance and healing your gut—without drugs, and without dieting, and without making yourself miserable, then please grab our free guide HERE, or watch our free training HERE.