Welcome to The Lost Debate, a show for Politically Ecclectics. I'm Robbie Gupta, and today I'm joined again by Dr. Drew Kulahar from The New Yorker and Cornell.

He is a practicing physician and he has the sort of cherished seat that used to belong to a tool goonde at the New Yorker where he just writes long-form articles about the major health issues of the day.

We spend the beginning of the conversations talking about Doge and healthcare, where I try to do my

best to Steelman arguments Drew is making around whether the Doge cuts are destructive to American

science or not. And then during the second two-thirds or half of the conversation, we talk about ultra-processed foods.

And I think that conversation is going to leave you with a lot to think about your diet. It certainly

has changed the way I think about my diet. Just the question of like, what are ultra-processed foods

doing to us and are they bad for us? So I think you're going to get a lot out of this conversation. Let's

jump right in.

Drew, welcome back. Thanks for having me. All right. Well, let's start with this article you wrote

titled Trump's agenda is undermining science. And I think a useful starting point is just

to lay out, like what's the government's role

been in funding medicine, biomedical advances, you know, like, what do people see around them

on a daily basis in the medical system that the government is at least mainly a partially

responsible for.

Sure. I mean, I think it's helpful to start with a little bit of history, which is that,

you know, the United States was not always the biomedical leader of the world in a way that it is

today. And so if you think about, you know, the 19th century, even early parts of the 20th century,

a lot of the advances that made modern medicine what it is

was coming out of Europe. And the U.S. really had to make a concerted effort to try to catch up

with Europe and eventually surpass it in some of the biomedical innovation space. And so this all

started to change in the Second World War. That's when we really saw a muscular intervention

...