Tony Lyons: Good News – Safer Products for Our Children

On the MAHA Media Hub, Tony Lyons celebrates recent Trump admin. policy changes making products safer for our children.

Welcome to the MAHA Media Hub, and welcome to the MAHA Revolution. I'm Tony Lyons, President of MAHA Action.

I want to talk today about the two things that go into your children more than almost anything else — the food on their plates and the shots in their arms. And this week, for the first time in a very long time, we saw real progress on both. Real transparency. Real accountability. The kind of change MAHA has been fighting so hard for.

Let’s start with food. And let me tell you about something most Americans have never heard of, even though it’s been shaping what’s in their pantry for more than 65 years. It’s called the GRAS loophole. G-R-A-S. It stands for “Generally Recognized as Safe.”

Here’s how it works or at least how it’s supposed to work – and I promise you, when you hear this you’re going to be angry. Back in 1958, Congress passed an exemption. The idea was simple: you shouldn’t have to run salt, or vinegar, or flour through years of drug-style testing. Everybody knows they’re safe. Fine. That’s common sense. But watch what happened to that common-sense idea.

Over the decades — and especially after a procedural change in 1997 — that narrow little exemption got twisted into something monstrous. Today, a food company can invent a brand-new chemical, hire its own experts to declare it safe, put it straight into the food your kids eat for breakfast — and never tell the FDA a thing. Not one word. The government doesn’t review it. The government doesn’t even know it exists.

Think about what that means. The companies get to be their own judge, their own jury, and their own referee on whether the chemicals they profit from are safe for your family. That is the very definition of a conflict of interest. And the result is exactly what you’d expect: thousands of chemicals have been added into the American food supply with no independent research at all, and the FDA finds out there’s a problem after people start getting sick. But even then it’s hard to prove because the whole process is corrupt and the government agencies have a history of being captured.

We’ve been running a nationwide science experiment on our own children and the results are now in, and they are not good. We have the sickest children on earth.

But that is finally starting to change. This week the FDA proposed a new rule to close that loophole, the GRAS loophole. For the first time, companies would be required to notify the FDA whenever they decide a new ingredient is “safe.” The agency would build a public inventory so you and I can actually see what’s being put in our food. And there’d be a pathway to go back and review the substances already on the market. Transparency. The most basic thing a government owes its people in a democracy.

And it doesn’t stop there. HHS and USDA just submitted the federal government’s first-ever official definition of “ultra-processed foods.” Now, that might sound like a technicality, but it’s a big deal — because for years, the lack of a real definition has been used as an excuse to avoid studying this stuff seriously.

Secretary Kennedy has pointed out that ultra-processed foods now make up close to seventy percent of the American diet. Seventy percent. And more than one in five of our children is now obese. Those two facts don’t exist independently. You can’t fix a problem you refuse to even define — and now, finally, we’re defining it.

Now, let’s talk about the other thing going into our kids — vaccines. This week the president signed an executive order that does something MAHA has demanded for years: it puts parents back in the driver’s seat, and it puts real science back at the center of the conversation.

Here’s what it does. It establishes a new gold-standard set of childhood vaccine recommendations, cutting the list of routinely recommended core vaccinations down to eleven diseases — Secretary Kennedy notes the earlier HHS and CDC overhaul brought it from seventeen down to eleven. It removes hepatitis B, Covid -19, and influenza from the list of shots routinely recommended for all children. It recommends separating the measles, mumps, and rubella shot into three separate vaccines given at separate visits.

But now we have the option to space out vaccines across multiple visits. The president’s own example was roughly five visits in the first year of life, with a child getting about twenty percent of the old single-visit load each time.

And it’s built around one principle above all: parental choice. Parents who want their children to receive every vaccine on the old schedule can absolutely still do that, fully covered by insurance. Nothing is being taken away. But it protects religious and medical exemption rights, and it directs the Attorney General to pursue legal action against states that violate those exemptions. It encourages states — and note, twenty-eight of them have already diverged from the CDC since January — to write these recommendations into their school-enrollment laws, pointing to European countries that are able to keep measles vaccination rates high without heavy-handed school mandates. Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical industry is crying foul, calling the recommendations “dangerous,” “so wrong” – and saying it is “putting children’s health at risk.” The only thing in danger here is their profits.

And here’s the part I love most. The order directs continued, serious research — into vaccine safety, and into the real causes of autism — through the NIH’s Autism Data Science Initiative, ARPA-H, the National Toxicology Program, and the reinstated Task Force on Safer Childhood Vaccines, with a full response required within ninety days. Because that’s the whole point, isn’t it? For years, anyone who asked a hard question about the childhood schedule got shouted down with those three little words: “the science is settled.” But the science is never settled. It never has been and never will be. Real science welcomes questions. Real science says, ‘If you’re so sure, then study it in the open and prove it.’

The only people afraid of honest research are the people who don’t like where it might lead. This executive order gives Americans direct access to HHS’s own scientific assessment — going around the court rulings that had been holding all of this up.

Public trust gets rebuilt through transparency. Through honesty. Through dismantling the captured public health establishment that spent a generation destroying that trust, and betting we’d never find out.

Consider Dr. Anthony Fauci. Last week, Dr. Fauci was held in contempt of Congress, and the matter was referred to the Department of Justice. In recent investigations, buried in more than thirty-four thousand text messages, Fauci himself acknowledged that a covid vaccine dose in the first trimester “theoretically could be associated with miscarriage.”

And it gets worse. Investigations also found that one of the creators of mRNA vaccines wrote to Fauci to warn him that in pregnant animals, these particles were crossing the placenta and reaching the developing fetus. Now, what does an honest public servant do with a warning like that? He studies it. He tells the public. He lets mothers weigh the risk for themselves and make informed decisions.

But that is not what happened. Fauci’s first concern was not the finding — it was that the scientist wanted to hold a press conference, and what a mess that would make. He protected himself and ignored risks to a mother and her unborn child. He saw it as a PR problem to be managed. That is the old way. And that is precisely what this movement is bringing to an end.

That’s what connects food and vaccines. It’s the same fight, the same principle. Transparency over secrecy. Informed consent over blind faith. Parents over corporations. Real science over marketing slogans. For a generation, powerful interests got to decide what went into our children’s bodies without ever having to show their work. That era is ending. And today we are celebrating that.

On today’s show, you’ll hear from Dr. Eric Berg, “The Knowledge Doc”; human biologist, Gary Brecka; health coach and author of The Truth About Seed Oils, Liana Werner-Gray; Russell Brand, comedian and author; Jeffrey Tucker, founder and President of the Brownstone Institute; molecular toxicologist and activist. Dr. Alexandra Muñoz; Marla Maples, co-founder of The Global Wellness Forum and The Marla Maples Foundation; and Austin Rogers, candidate for Congress in Florida.

First up we have a leader and a legend in traditional food, Sally Fallon. She is an author, nutrition educator, and the founding president of the Weston A. Price Foundation (WAPF) and the founder of Campaign for Real Milk. She is the owner of a farm which produces raw cheese and raw milk from pastured cows, pastured meats and grass-fed poultry and eggs. She most recently wrote The Truth About Contagion. Her best selling book, Nourishing Traditions, blends scientific research, culinary expertise, and advocacy to promote diets rich in whole, nutrient-dense foods. A generation of children can thank her for their good health! Welcome Sally!

[A full recording of the August 12, 2026 Media Hub will be available on YouTube by noon EST on 8/13.]