Del, you’ve spent years exposing what’s wrong with the medical system. But let’s flip it. What does genuine health actually look like to you?
Genuine health is the absence of pharmaceutical dependency. That’s my north star. If you wake up every morning and your first thought is which pill you need to take to function, something has gone profoundly wrong. The human body is the most sophisticated healing machine ever designed. Whether you believe that you were created in the image and likeness of God, or you believe your body is the product of millions of years of evolution, your immune system is perfectly designed to thrive on this planet. Genuine health is getting out of its way and letting it function as intended. In my opinion, the medical system was supposed to be there for emergencies, like trauma, acute illness, and genuine crisis. Somewhere along the way, it decided its job was to manage us from cradle to grave. That fosters a dependency on a system which has led us away from the promised land of health.
You’ve said your mother used to question why you were working on a medical talk show when you’d never been to a doctor. What did that upbringing actually give you?
It gave me the most important thing anyone can have: a baseline. I know what it feels like to live in a body that isn’t medicated. I know what real energy feels like. I know what an actual immune response feels like – fever, rest, recovery, and then feeling genuinely stronger on the other side. Most people have never experienced that because they’ve been interfering in their own biology since the day they were born. My mother was deeply intentional. She understood that the body knows things that medicine is still catching up to. I grew up with that as the default. And when I got inside the machine and watched it operate, that baseline told me something was very, very wrong here.
Longevity is having a massive cultural moment right now – biohacking, supplements, biological age testing. What do you make of all of it?
Some of it is genuinely exciting, and some of it is just the pharmaceutical model wearing a wellness costume. When longevity science starts with the assumption that you need to buy seventeen supplements and run your bloodwork through a proprietary algorithm every three months to be healthy, I get skeptical fast. The longest-lived populations on earth aren’t taking NMN. They’re eating food that comes from the ground, moving their bodies naturally, sleeping when it gets dark, maintaining deep social bonds, and living with a sense of purpose. That’s the longevity stack that actually works. Now, are there things we can learn from emerging science about optimizing that? Absolutely. But don’t let the longevity industry convince you that health is complicated. They profit from complexity. Real health is almost embarrassingly simple. That’s not to say I think that all of these new technologies are useless or suspect – I think what we are seeing out of tech in the wellness space right now is very interesting. I like to keep an open mind and, as always, make sure I do my own research. If I am putting something inside of my body, I want to know everything about it.
Where does conventional medicine get longevity completely wrong?
It treats longevity as the absence of disease markers on a lab panel. Your cholesterol is within range, your blood pressure is controlled, and your A1C looks good; therefore, you are healthy and will live a long life. Those “normal” ranges are just comparisons against the average population, and in case you haven’t looked around, the general public isn’t all that healthy. We have the highest rates of chronic disease in the world. I consider this “managed decline,” not health. You can have perfect numbers and a completely depleted life force. Conventional medicine has almost no framework for vitality. It doesn’t measure your energy, your resilience, your immune competence, your mental clarity, or your joy. It measures what it can bill for. True longevity is about building such a robust foundation of health that disease has nowhere to take root. It isn’t about suppressing symptoms until your body finally gives out.
What does your own daily health practice actually look like?
I keep it simple because I think simplicity is the whole point. I prioritize sleep above almost everything. If I’m not sleeping, nothing else works. I eat real food. I intermittently fast to keep my eating within a 6-8 hour window. This increases apoptosis, which means I’m killing off old cells that our incredibly toxic environment may have contaminated. I move every day, not because I’m chasing a physique but because my body is designed to move and it tells me when it hasn’t. I get sunlight in the morning. I try to keep my stress low and my purpose high because I genuinely believe that chronic stress is one of the most underrated killers we have. I have a regular meditation practice because I believe spiritual wellness is one of the most important pillars, and I stay away from the medical system as much as humanly possible, not out of fear but out of respect for what my body can do without interference.
What’s your position on holistic and alternative medicine — chiropractic, naturopathy, homeopathy, acupuncture?
My position is that anything with a thousand-year track record of keeping human beings healthy deserves more respect than a drug that’s been on the market for eight years and has seventeen side effects listed on its package insert. These modalities exist because they worked. They persisted across cultures, across centuries, across every attempt to suppress or ridicule them, because people kept experiencing results. Now, I’m not saying every practitioner of every modality is equally skilled or that everything works for everyone. I’m saying the dismissal of these entire fields by conventional medicine is more of a territorial last-grasp and not scientific. It’s an industry protecting its market share. I have personally experienced profound healing through approaches that a conventional doctor would have laughed at. I trust my body’s testimony over their condescension.
Fear seems to be the primary tool of the conventional medical system. How do you deprogram from that?
You start by understanding the business model. Fear is not an accident; it is the product. I watched it being manufactured in real time while working on a major medical television show. We would produce segments designed specifically to make you afraid of a disease so that by the end of the segment you were ready to ask your doctor about whatever solution they were about to offer you. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it. Deprogramming starts with asking one simple question every time a medical authority tries to frighten you: who benefits? Who benefits from my fear right now? And why does every answer to my new problem appear to be another pill, injection, or surgery? Then count how many pharma commercials there are during every commercial break when you watch TV and recognize it’s time to turn it off, tune it out, and take a walk.
What do you think is the single most underrated factor in long-term health?
Purpose. Without question. I have watched people deteriorate rapidly after retirement because they lost their reason to get up. Their bodies were functioning just fine, but they lost their drive, their “why? And I have watched people survive things that should have killed them because they had something left to do. The body responds to meaning. It is not a machine that runs on calories and sleep alone. It runs on conviction. It runs on love. It runs on the sense that your presence here matters. The research on this is actually profound – social connection, purpose, and community are among the strongest predictors of longevity we have. And yet you will never see a pharmaceutical commercial telling you to find your calling. There’s no money in that prescription.
If you could get every parent to do one thing differently for their children’s health starting tomorrow, what would it be?
First, visit AnInconvenientStudy.com and watch my new movie. Then focus on feeding your children real food, giving them clean water to drink, and trusting the rare fever when it happens. I mean that literally, and I mean it as a metaphor. When your child gets a fever, that is not a malfunction; that is the immune system doing exactly what it was designed to do. The fever is burning out the pathogen. The discomfort is the healing. We have raised an entire generation of parents who have been trained to suppress every symptom the moment it appears, and what we have produced is a generation of children with immune systems that have never been allowed to learn. Let the fever run. Keep your child hydrated, keep them comfortable, watch them carefully, and then watch them come out the other side stronger. That experience, that recovery, builds something that no vaccine schedule can replicate. Trust the body you were given. It knows what it’s doing.
You talk a lot about what to avoid. But what are you genuinely excited about in health and medicine right now?
Honestly, the awakening. I know that sounds like a non-answer, but hear me out. The most exciting development in health right now isn’t a drug or a technology. It’s the fact that millions of people are rejecting the default. They’re asking questions their parents never thought to ask. They’re researching ingredients. They’re firing doctors who won’t have conversations. They’re finding practitioners who treat them like intelligent adults. That cultural shift – that is the most powerful medicine I have ever witnessed. When people stop outsourcing their health to an authority and start taking genuine ownership of their bodies, the results are staggering. Beyond that, I’m excited about what’s happening in metabolic health research, in the microbiome space, in the growing understanding of how food functions as information in the body. We are on the edge of a complete reframe of what health even means. We are also seeing a big shift, with the general public beginning to really explore holistic wellness on its own merits. I just want to make sure the pharmaceutical industry doesn’t find a way to monetize it before people get there themselves.
The food supply is something RFK Jr. has made central to MAHA. How sick is it really, and how much does it matter?
It is far worse than most people are willing to accept. We are the most medicated, most chronically ill, most overweight developed nation on earth, and we are also the nation that has allowed the most chemicals, dyes, preservatives, and pesticide residues into our food supply. Which means America’s regulatory agencies have failed us. This didn’t happen in a vacuum. Other countries have banned ingredients that sit openly on American grocery store shelves. Ultra-processed foods now account for the majority of calories consumed by American children. The majority. We are feeding our kids products that were engineered in a laboratory to be addictive, that have no nutritional value, and that actively disrupt hormones, gut bacteria, and neurological development, and then we are genuinely baffled by the explosion in childhood anxiety, ADHD, obesity, and autoimmune disease. The food is the foundation. You cannot drug your way out of a poisoned food supply. You cannot supplement your way out of it. You have to fix what’s on the plate.
You’ve built your life around conviction and mission. What’s the relationship between that and physical health?
Profound and inseparable. I genuinely believe that unresolved emotional and spiritual tension manifests in the body. The research on this is no longer fringe; it’s some of the most compelling science being done right now. Chronic stress, unprocessed grief, suppressed anger, a life lived out of alignment with your values- these things create a physiological environment where disease thrives. I have seen people heal from conditions that medicine had given up on simply by removing the source of chronic stress from their lives. And I have seen people with perfect diets and rigorous exercise routines deteriorate because they were living in quiet desperation. Your body is listening to every thought you think and every emotion you carry. So yes, purpose, conviction, alignment—these are health interventions—some of the most powerful ones available to us.
Last question. What do you want your legacy to be? Not as an activist, but as someone who lived the health philosophy he preached?
I want to be the proof of concept. I want people to look at my life and say “he never outsourced his health, he never lived in fear of his own biology, he trusted his body, he ate real food, he stayed away from the machine, and he lived a long, vital, fully conscious life right up until the end.” That’s the testimony I want to leave. Not a list of supplements I endorsed or protocols I followed, just a life lived as evidence that the body, when respected and trusted, is capable of extraordinary things. And beyond my own body, I want to have been part of the generation that turned this around; that said ‘enough,’ that protected the children, that left the next generation a fighting chance at the kind of health that used to be considered normal. That would be enough for me. That would be everything.
About Del Bigtree
Del Bigtree is one of the preeminent voices of the MAHA Movement. He was the Director of Communications for Robert Kennedy Jr.’s 2024 presidential campaign, the founder and CEO of the non-profit Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), and the host of the internet talk show TheHighWire.com, which boasts over 400 million views worldwide. A former Emmy-winning producer of the CBS talk show The Doctors, and most recently Executive Producer of the film, An Inconvenient Study. Del’s multi-pronged approach incorporates media, legislative, and legal actions to expose the fraud, lies, and conflicts of interest that have allowed US regulatory agencies to collude with industry power brokers to evade standardized safety testing on products including vaccines, drugs, food, drinking water, and 5G. On behalf of American citizens, Del’s nonprofit, ICAN, has submitted over 1,000 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and won multiple lawsuits against government agencies, including HHS, NIH, FDA, and CDC. Most notable are the FDA case that forced the release of Pfizer’s Covid Vaccine trial data, which the FDA had attempted to hide for 75 years; the CDC case that forced the release of the CDC’s V-Safe Covid Vaccine Injury data; and the State of Mississippi Case, which reinstated the Religious Exemption from Vaccination, which had been denied for over 30 years.
About Michele Hughes
Michele Hughes is the visionary founder of Ageless and Timeless and the dynamic host of the Ageless and Timeless Podcast®. As a monthly contributor to TopDoctor Magazine, she offers powerful insights on wellness, longevity, and living fully at every stage of life. With a deep passion for health and vitality, and serving as a role model for timeless elegance, Michele empowers audiences to embrace their highest potential and live with purpose and grace. Michele’s podcast, Ageless and Timeless, was one of 20 Inaugural Podcasts selected for the Muscle and Fitness Plus platform that began in 2023.
For more information, please reach out to express interest in being a potential guest on the Ageless and Timeless Podcast® or to be featured in the TopDoctor Magazine Ageless and Timeless column with Michele Hughes. For podcast collaborations or to have Michele Hughes on your show, please contact her at:
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