So I’m reading this article last month in The Wall Street Journal with the heading: “Everyone in Trump’s cabinet is eating sauerkraut.”
It starts: “A new diet is sweeping through President Trump’s cabinet—and it involves heaping portions of sauerkraut. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Vice President JD Vance have all embraced the diet, drawn by the promise of slimmer waistlines and glowing skin…..“Within 30 days I lost 20 pounds,” Kennedy said at an event in Michigan this week. “JD Vance is also on the diet and you can see how different he looks.”
And I’m thinking, this is so nice. This is what MAHA (make America healthy again) should be all about—top government officials setting dietary examples to all of us out there among the masses. What a great followup to the shift last year in federal dietary guidelines to encourage consumption of fermented foods to improve gut health.
It’s all a far cry from the early days of this blog, when readers would point out overweight and out-of-shape public health investigators shutting down farms and stores selling raw dairy products.
But then I read further in the WSJ article, to discover that these cabinet officials learned about the fermented foods from “Dr. Sean O’Mara, who advises his high-profile patients to eat fermented foods such as sauerkraut and kimchi, alongside grass-fed steak—and to abstain from alcohol and sugary food.” The cost of O’Mara’s advice? According to the WSJ: “’Optimization plans’ at O’Mara’s practice start at $8,000, according to his website. A direct consultation with O’Mara will cost you $18,000.”
Warning: I get a little political here. This WSJ article came out just as news was breaking about some unhealthy decisions from the administration and financial windfalls being realized by Trump and his cabinet members. Trump issued an executive order mandating “production of glyphosate-based herbicides, which are the most widely used crop-protection tools in U.S. agriculture — enabling efficient food and livestock feed production that protects food supply chains and ensures the availability of healthy, affordable food options within reach for American families.” I’m sorry, but everything I’ve read about glysophate, including negative court decisions, suggests it may be a dangerous carcinogen.
And then there was news that the families of Trump and his Commerce secretary Lutnick are sharing tens or possibly hundreds of millions of dollars in fees and stock associated with deals for rare earth minerals around the world. And Trump himself earned in excess of $2 billion over the last year on crypto and other deals, various media reported.
So now I have an idea about how these guys access such pricey dietary advice: although you have to wonder if they are even paying for stuff like this when they are such great marketing and promotional outlets, such as via the WSJ article I quoted from. The diet doc should be paying them for signing on to his pitch.
Maybe the best news is that you don’t need the advice of Dr. O’Mara to benefit from fermented foods. They’ve been around for thousands of years, helping improve health, and they’ll continue to be around for a long time, long after naive pols have learned about the easily available benefits of healthy food.
$18,000 for recommending sauerkraut? That made my day. My grandma in Germany would have done it for free. She always had a small barrel of white cabbage in the basement that fermented into sauerkraut over the winter. (Unfortunately, she was a terrible cook. I always ate the sauerkraut raw, which I still enjoy today!)
:-))
Thank you, Reiner, for your reminder of good basic wisdom. Americans have a unique ability to make businesses out of stuff that is ordinarily free. The doc getting those big fees is a great example; as some would say, it’s what makes America great!
Speaking of the ability to get other people to pay for information of questionable value, we are learning about the many losers in our president’s crypto business dealings. This just out:
“An up-to-date tally of Trump followers turned crypto investors is in. And for them, the overall results are remarkably bad.
“Nearly 1 million people who bought President Trump’s memecoin have lost money through the end of June, according to a report by the cryptocurrency analytics firm Nansen. Their losses total $3.81 billion.
“The analytics firm’s assessment was calculated this week after Mr. Trump signed an annual financial disclosure showing that he walked away with a $636 million payout on the same crypto bet, part of a haul of at least $2.2 billion from all of his business ventures in 2025.
“The odds were always in his favor. Mr. Trump profited whether the price of his memecoin went up or down. He collected returns whenever anyone traded the tokens, as he repeatedly pushed his followers to do, using his Truth Social account to promote the coin.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/04/us/politics/trump-coin-crypto-investors-loss.html
Bayer loves a nazi-fascist collaborator and protector. Nothing like declaring that Roundup must be protected as a national security issue. That cover provides federal pre-emption for all liability. WW2 is a clear example of how Bayer performed unspeakable, lethal, medical research on concentration camp prisoners of all ages. Roundup is a known toxic poison and powerful antibiotic. Roundup is a known cause of cancer. Bayer bought Roundup and Monsanto for $63 Billion in 2018.
The circular connections are profound. Massive money over health or even humanity. Great way to Make America Healthy Again.
Mark, It is a misnomer to label Roundup/glyphosate as an antibiotic… While legally classified primarily as an herbicide for agricultural and domestic use, it is also recognized as a biocide because it kills a wide variety of plant and microbial life. The medical profession is increasingly using several toxic chemical biocides such as fluroquinolones as an alternative to treat antibiotic resistant infections. While this destructive shotgun approach may seem logical by those who focus on microbes, or “weeds” in the case of agriculture, as the root of the problem, what they fail to realize is that they are digging themselves further into a hole.
The relationship between the chemical/pharmaceutical industry and governments worldwide is extensive and has been that way for close to 200 years… To break that stranglehold relationship on governments the public at large needs to be less obsessed with controlling natural processes using destructive methods that in the end cause a great deal more harm then good. Unfortunately, I cannot see that happening any time soon due to the sectarian nature of the above relationship.
Ken,
Glyphosate was patented by Monsanto not only as a herbicide but also as an antibiotic. The relevant patent (United States Patent 7,771,736) was granted in 2010, indicating its potential use in treating microbial infections and controlling parasites. Roundup is classified as an antibiotic with powerful and very destructive human gut microbiome effects. It causes gut microbiome dysbiosis
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31442459/
Yes, biocides such as glyphosate are often referred to as antibiotics which is highly misleading. A tactic not unheard of in medicine and the pharmaceutical/chemical industry.
“Glyphosate the active ingredient in Roundup was discovered and initially patented as a chemical chelator (to descale pipes) in the 1960s. Monsanto later discovered its herbicidal properties and patented it as an herbicide, commercializing it as Roundup in 1974. Monsanto did subsequently patent it as an antimicrobial/antibiotic in 2010.”
I hold to my statement back in the day following Roundup’s introduction when the powers that be attempted to convince us that Roundup/glyphosate was unharmful and biodegradable… “anything that has such a wide spectrum of toxicity cannot but be harmful to ecosystems”.
Agreed!