Chef says 'horrible stomach problems' led him on MAHA journey
American Gravy restaurant group owner Andrew Gruel appeared on Saturday's episode of "My View with Lara Trump" to speak about his MAHA journey, sharing a few tips on how to prepare healthy meals and what he thinks needs to change in the food industry. (See the video at the top of this article.)
Gruel expanded on those thoughts with Fox News Digital, revealing how he developed stomach issues in his late teenage years that got so bad he "either had to stay in a classroom or an area effectively near a bathroom."
"Funny enough, that's what got me into the kitchen," Gruel told Fox News Digital. "I didn't have to go anywhere. I ultimately dropped out of college and just kept working in restaurants. They were my place of safety."
Then, 10 to 15 years later, Gruel said, he "started cutting out" all processed foods and seed oils from his diet.
"I was healed," he said.
"I mean, after medicine and pharmaceuticals and all these different drugs they were trying to put me on, it just never went away. I lived with it. I managed it. Changing my diet ultimately fixed that and changed it altogether."
That's when, Gruel said, he started to "believe in the power of MAHA."
He told Lara Trump on her show that making healthy meals at home is "pretty easy."
He demonstrated that by showing viewers how to prepare fresh scallops with an arugula and green apple salad.
During the segment, Trump asked Gruel what he hopes will change with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of Health and Human Services, leading the charge in President Donald Trump's second term.
Gruel said he'd like to see the deregulation of the restaurant industry's food supply chain.
That would allow, he said, for direct access between restaurants and small farmers and independent fishermen who are "creating all those amazing products that, for some reason, we're shipping overseas, and then we're importing products."
"It's very difficult for small- and medium-sized farmers to get their food to restaurants and distributors," Gruel told Fox News Digital.
For one thing, he said, there are a limited number of processors and packers within the industry.
"We need to break down the consolidation at the top."
"This means there's almost a cartel at the top of the food chain that buys all of the products from these small farmers, repackages them, processes them and then sells them to the big distributors," Gruel said.
"If the small farmers could bypass the big packers and more easily sell to small- and mid-sized distributors, healthy food would get to the restaurants and wholesale distributors much easier."
Gruel said this can be achieved "by making it easier for these businesses to obtain permits, licensing and regulations to cross state lines with their products."
He believes that if the infrastructure was expanded to smaller distributors, "we will see a lot healthier food at the right price entering the food service sector."
"We need to break down the consolidation at the top."
The National Restaurant Association declined to comment on the subject.
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Target and Walmart sell supplements containing bovine collagen (a protein found in cowhide and bone) and colostrum (the rich liquid that mammals produce for their newborn offspring); they promise healthier skin, a happier gut, and stronger immunity, and come in flavors such as watermelon lime, lemon sorbet, and 'valiant grape.' You can buy cow-placenta pills for postpartum healing, or powdered bull testicle for testosterone support. The slightest interaction with clean-beauty Instagram can fill your feed with ads for beef-tallow lip balms, cleansing creams, sunscreen, and deodorants. (One brand even offers creamsicle-flavored beef-tallow personal lubricant, which is currently out of stock online.) Influencers praise tallow for clearing their acne and eczema—and offer discount codes so you can experience the same. Even the government's recent public-health messaging has veered toward the bovine. During his tenure as health secretary, Robert F. 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But the label is not strictly enforced, and it doesn't necessarily prohibit farmers from giving cows antibiotics or hormones. There's no guarantee that a cow whose colostrum is harvested to be sold by a tradwife on Instagram had a happy, bucolic existence. Not to mention that colostrum, whey, and placenta do not come out of the cow in the form of powders or pills. The spread of science misinformation, along with legitimate concerns about the state of public health in the United States, have left many Americans understandably confused about whether conventional science and Western medicine can be trusted in 2025. Getting to the bottom of, say, the seed-oil controversy requires engaging with thorny scientific debates that reference inscrutable research papers; embracing the natural and ancestral by opting for tallow is an attractively simple-seeming alternative. 'It brings with it a sense of purity or wholesomeness that is desirable right now,' Marianne Clark, a sociologist at Acadia University who studies wellness trends, told me. In this sense, cowmaxxing is not so much a health endeavor as it is a spiritual one, its promise downright biblical: Cowliness is next to godliness.
