If you want to do yourself the biggest favor–if you really want to change your life and develop your awareness and bring health and well-being into your future, then get ahold of a recent interview with Casey and Calley Means and Tucker Carlson.

The Means are brother and sister who grew up in Washington, D.C. and strove for all the big tickets in life—Ivy League educations, doctoral degrees, big jobs, big paychecks. Casey became a head and neck surgeon and Calley became a lobbyist. But one day, as Casey began to operate on a woman who had multiple health problems, it occurred to her that she was profiting from her patient’s problems, rather than looking at the whole person and helping her get well. The next day, she walked into the office of the Chief of Surgery and handed over her scalpel. Then she convinced her brother to pay attention to what she was learning about food and the companies who make food so they could, together, go out and alert the rest of us.

Casey points out that half the United States is diabetic or pre-diabetic. 1 in 39 children have autism. Cancer in young adults is up 73 percent. Infertility advances at 1 percent a year. 30 percent of school-aged children are obese. The statistics go on, and yes, they are depressing, but the Means’ point out that the state of our health and our food situation aren’t entirely our fault.

75-percent of the Food and Drug Administrtion’s budget is funded by food or pharmaceutical companies. Coco-Cola is a big contributor to the Diabetes Foundation, as is Cadbury Chocolate. Medical Schools are often funded by Pharmaceutical Companies. Do you see the problem here? Many of the studies we see on food and health are actually funded by food companies so health advice and facts about nutrition are filtered through those studies.

I have written in this column before how food companies have addicted us to food through a careful and purposeful balance of salt and sugar. Many of the things we eat and drink make us hungrier rather than satiate us. We often treat one Coke as something innocent but, in fact, one Coke contains the sugar of 15 oranges. And what we don’t know is killing us.

We are in a crisis in America when it comes to our health and not enough of us are paying attention. Most American medical universities fail to offer one nutrition class to their medical students, and yet, pesticides in our food and eating too much processed food are at the root of many or most of our health problems, according to the Means. To cure ourselves, we must start thinking for ourselves and making better choices.

To start, we’ve got to tame our love affair with sugar.

We’re eating too much of it and it does things like store in our body as fat or it goes on to feed cancer cells or it causes inflammation in our bodies.

Reducing our sugar intake is among the the single most important steps we can take to get our health on a better track. That, and processed foods. Processed foods contain refined flours, cane sugar and seed oils. Lucky Charms is an example of a processed food. So are Pop Tarts and frozen waffles. Eat an orange instead in the morning, some whole wheat bread or organic granola. Lord, I know it sounds boring, but it’s an important component of health. See food as medicine, if that makes it easier. And once you get past the cravings for sugary drinks and junk food, you’ll find this all easier to incorporate into your life.

Make dinner almost every night of the week. Preparing healthy food for our families is often shunned in the media, who have gone as far as to say that Americans are too busy and we should let restaurants do the cooking for us. But cooking at home with lean meats and vegetables bought from one of our amazing farmstands is the healthiest choice you can make.

When you come home from a farmstand and lay out all those beautiful vegetables and fruits, you can’t help but feel grateful. Right there is the food that is going to nourish you all week, keep you sharp, provide you the energy to get through the days ahead. And when you’re choosing well, it’s the food that’s going to get you through life.

Casey points out that now we are seeing children sick at birth, mostly from mothers who have metabolic deficiencies. Those deficiencies are passed onto their babies in utero.

It’s easy to be confused about food choices. I think that’s done on purpose. So here’s the takeaway: eat whole food, and organic if you can. Fruits, vegetables, lean meats.

And if you can find it, watch that interview. It’s likely to be the most profound and informative interview you’ve seen in your life.