The Circle of Death: How the Healthcare, Food, and Pharmaceutical Industries Are Keeping You Unhealthy
Nobody in any of these industries want you to understand how the healthcare system is keeping women unhealthy.
Your exhaustion isn’t a character flaw. Your weight gain isn’t a willpower problem. And your hormonal chaos, your chronic pain, your brain fog, your anxiety — these are not personal failures.
They are the predictable, documented, and in many cases deliberate outcomes of living inside a system that profits from keeping you sick, confused, and dependent.
Three industries in particular have built something I call the Circle of Death — a loop that’s almost impossible to escape once you’re caught in it. And the more you understand how it actually works, the angrier you’re going to get.
But hopefully that anger will motivate you to do something.
First, Let Me Tell You What Happened to Me
In April 2024, at 57 years old, I was diagnosed with stage 3 invasive lobular carcinoma at a routine breast exam. Within two months I had a double mastectomy, multiple rounds of chemo, and 15 rounds of radiation. I was also raising two teenagers, taking care of my elderly father, and being thrown into medical menopause overnight.
And here’s what I learned in the middle of all of that: the system that was supposed to help me heal was simultaneously the system that had made it easier for me to get sick in the first place. WTF?
That’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s just what the data shows when you start looking.
The Circle of Death — Here’s How It Actually Works
These industries don’t have a formal agreement. They don’t actually need one because their financial incentives do the coordinating for them.
The Food Industry
Manufactures cheap, hyper-palatable, engineered products that are specifically designed to be addictive and convenient. They lobby aggressively against regulation, fund “nutrition research” that conveniently supports their products, and have systematically replaced real food with chemistry experiments on grocery store shelves. And somehow, they’ve managed to market these products as ‘healthy.’ More than 50% of what US adults eat daily is now ultra-processed food — and two-thirds of what kids and teenagers eat. This is not an accident. It is the result of decades of deliberate strategy. We’ve given up our health for convenience.
The Healthcare and Insurance System
Is built to manage symptoms, not prevent disease. You come in sick, you get a prescription, you’re sent home. Doctors learn about pharmaceuticals, not nutrition. Insurance companies deny claims at staggering rates — in 2023, UnitedHealthcare denied 33% of ACA marketplace claims, while their CEO testified to Congress that their denial rate was “less than 2%.” Meanwhile, the average appointment for a complex midlife health issue is about 12 minutes, and hormonal health — something that affects every single woman on the planet — gets approximately four minutes of airtime per visit. If you’re lucky.
The Pharmaceutical Industry
Develops and sells drugs for the chronic diseases the food industry exacerbates. Diabetes medications. Cardiovascular drugs. Antidepressants for the anxiety that comes from living in a body that’s been chronically undernourished and under-slept. The list goes on.
They market directly to the consumer, charge whatever they need to make a profit, fund the research that says you need more of their products, and have a powerful financial interest in treatment continuing indefinitely. Prevention doesn’t make money. Management does.
Here’s the Loop:
You eat ultra-processed food that wreaks havoc on your body (but is convenient and cheap).
Your health goes downhill and you see the doctor, who prescribes medication.
The medication manages your symptoms.
You keep eating ultra-processed food because it’s easy and you believe the ‘healthy’ marketing.
You continue to get unhealthier and you need more medication.
This repeats until something serious happens.
That’s the circle. And right now, most of us are in it.
What the Research Actually Shows
Here’s some numbers. Not to overwhelm you — but because these facts are being buried by the very industries that you need to know the truth about.
On Ultra-Processed Food:
A landmark series of papers published in The Lancet in late 2025, authored by more than 40 prominent health experts, concluded that ultra-processed foods are a leading contributor to the chronic disease epidemic. Not a contributing factor. A leading contributor.
A Swedish study of 27,670 participants found that ultra-processed food consumption increases all-cause mortality — and the effect was especially pronounced in women. Higher consumption was linked to reduced HDL (good cholesterol), increased VLDL (bad cholesterol), elevated cardiovascular disease risk, and 25 identified adverse health outcomes including respiratory disease, kidney problems, and mental health issues.
A 2025 Harvard analysis found that women who eat higher amounts of ultra-processed foods — including highly processed bread, breakfast foods, and soda — have a significantly higher risk of developing colorectal cancer.
And the food industry knows all of this. They fund research that muddies the water. And they reformulate products slightly so they can claim they’re “working on it.” They lobby against labeling requirements. And then they air commercials about family dinners and wholesome ingredients while selling you something that was engineered in a lab.
On the Healthcare System:
A 2025 survey found that 93% of women feel dismissed when seeking medical help. Not occasionally. As their standard experience of the healthcare system.
Women wait an average of 30 minutes longer than men to be seen in emergency departments. Women with acute abdominal pain are 25% less likely than men to receive adequate pain treatment for identical symptoms. Middle-aged women presenting with chest pain are twice as likely as men with the same symptoms to be diagnosed with a mental illness rather than investigated for cardiac disease.
In a 2024 study of women with chronic gynecological conditions, 45% had been told to “just relax more” and 39% were made to feel they were “crazy.” Fifty-five percent had considered not returning for medical care at all — because what’s the point of going to a system that doesn’t believe you?
The National Academies released a report in January 2025 confirming that research on diseases disproportionately affecting women is systematically underfunded compared to diseases affecting men. The NIH’s proportion of funding dedicated to women’s health has actually declined over the past decade. And don’t forget all the funding that the current political administration has cut.
Let that sink in: we are half the population, we are living longer (but not healthier) than men, we are facing a documented epidemic of dismissal and misdiagnosis — and the research funding is going down.
On Insurance:
In 2023, insurers in the Medicare Advantage system partially or fully denied 3.2 million prior authorization requests. Three million, two hundred thousand times, someone who needed care was told no. And when these denials are appealed — when people actually fight back — the overwhelming majority are overturned. Which means the denials weren’t medically justified. They were financially motivated.
The CEO of UnitedHealth Group faced pointed congressional questioning about a three-year-old with a tumor in her bladder whose family faced bankruptcy because the company deemed her care “medically unnecessary.” He expressed sympathy. He did not address the case.
This is the system we’re supposed to trust with our health.
The Social Media “Solution” Is Making Things Worse
Here’s where it gets even more infuriating.
When women flee a healthcare system that dismisses them and a food system designed to keep them sick — when they desperately search for answers outside the loop — what do they find?
TikTok. Instagram. Wellness influencers with beautiful kitchens and zero medical qualifications.
And then the media picks it up. Because “woman steams her vagina to balance hormones” gets clicks. “Woman drinks chlorophyll water to detox” goes viral. “Woman tries raw potato juice for strep throat” becomes a trend. The algorithm rewards the sensational and the bizarre. The media amplifies whatever generates outrage and curiosity. And women who are desperate and dismissed end up consuming a firehose of wellness content where only 4 to 5 percent comes from actual credentialed experts.
The other 95-96%? People with opinions and a ring light.
And when those trends get picked up by mainstream media — when they’re featured in morning shows and wellness magazines as “what people are trying” — they get a veneer of legitimacy they absolutely have not earned. The media doesn’t have to endorse something to amplify it. Coverage is currency.
A 2025 study confirmed that only 2% of TikTok diet and nutrition trends are accurate compared to public health and nutrition guidelines. Yet 57% of Millennial and Gen Z users report frequently adopting nutrition trends they found on the platform.
Midlife Women are Not Immune to This
We’re not just scrolling past the raw carrot salad hormone trend. We share it in our Facebook groups. And we’re trying the berberine — the supplement being marketed as “nature’s Ozempic” by people who are not doctors and have not run clinical trials — because we’re in perimenopause and nobody in the healthcare system will have a real conversation with us about what’s happening to our bodies, so we’re taking medical advice from strangers on the internet.
This is not stupidity. This is desperation meeting a very sophisticated algorithm.
And both the algorithm and the media are profiting from it.
The Anger Is Appropriate
Please understand… I am not telling you this so you feel hopeless. I’m telling you this so you feel appropriately angry — and then appropriately motivated.
Because here’s the thing about understanding a system: once you see it, you can start making decisions that work around it instead of inside it.
You cannot fix the insurance industry. Or single-handedly reform Big Pharma. And you cannot defund the ultra-processed food lobby.
But you can stop being a passive participant in the loop.
You can start asking different questions. And educate yourself about what your body actually needs. You can build habits that reduce your dependence on the system — not by rejecting medicine entirely (that’s not the answer either), but by making it significantly less likely that you’ll need it for the things that are actually preventable.
Refuse to be dismissed, and advocate for yourself with information, not just frustration. Start recognizing wellness misinformation for what it is — a different kind of exploitation, just with fewer side effects than the pharmaceutical version.
And you can build a wellness practice that belongs to you — not to a program, not to a coach, not to an industry.
That’s what Part 2 of this series is about. The practical, no-BS path out of the loop — built by someone who had no choice but to find one.
Before You Go
I built RustiChic Wellness because I got sick and couldn’t find anything that actually addressed what I was going through. Not the cancer itself — but the whole environment that had made my body vulnerable in the first place. The food, the stress, the hormonal chaos, the dismissal from medical professionals, the anxiety that nobody warned me about.
So I figured it out myself. Documented everything. And turned it into a system.
If you’re ready to start stepping out of the loop, I have a free guide that’s a good place to begin. And additional tools are available for you to continue your wellness journey.
→ Download The Midlife Pivot Towards Wellness — FREE
And if you want to go deeper — the Reset & Rebuild Wellness System covers everything: real food, sleep, hormones, energy, movement, mental wellness, and the full reset framework. Built for midlife women. Written in plain language. Zero fake positivity.
→ Explore the Full Workbook Library
Part 2 is coming — and it’s the actionable half of this conversation. Because anger without a plan is just exhausting, and you’ve already done enough of that.
RustiChic Wellness | theRustiChic.com | @rustichicwellness is for personal guidance and wellness support — it’s not a substitute for professional medical advice. I am not a medical professional. Nothing in this post constitutes medical advice. Please consult your healthcare provider before making changes to your health practices, medications, or treatment plans.
