(WND)—According to a new report by the American Security Project, two out of three of the country’s reserve forces – nearly 68% – are overweight. On X, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth lamented: “Completely unacceptable. This is what happens when standards are IGNORED – and this is what we are changing. REAL fitness & weight standards are here. We will be FIT, not FAT.”
WorldNetDaily spoke to retired Navy Medical Service Corps officer Lt. Ted Macie, who provided data from the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database about overweightness and obesity. Using the International Classification of Diseases code of E66, it’s quite evident in the chart below that issues concerning weight have become a genuine problem in today’s military.
Between 2016 and 2029, there was an average of 13,863 cases recorded concerning overweightness and obesity across all branches of service. The average number of cases increased to 21,969 between 2020 and 2023. Incredibly, there was a 190 percent increase between 2020 and 2023, also tripling from 12,249 to 35,531.
“Hegseth is going after the low hanging fruit that should have been dealt with as people failed to meet the standards,” Macie argued. “We have to focus on why our troops fail to meet them and why the Department of Defense (DoD) chose to retain that group of people and purge those who did meet them but refused EUA products,” referring to so-called vaccines available for “emergency use only” – most notoriously, the COVID-19 mRNA shots.
What’s more, he added, “There are things that are consequentially bigger health issues at stake inside the DoD,” including the rise in incidents of myocarditis, pulmonary embolism, ovarian dysfunction and more throughout the military, following the now-rescinded 2021 COVID-19 shot mandate.
The major factor that has an obvious impact on obesity and fitness levels, said Macie, is nutrition. “The food on bases around the country is little more than fast food or genetically altered food,” he shared. Healthy options, to include organic foods for example, are largely unavailable.
“The SecDef needs to acknowledge that the shot caused a variety of adverse health events, including myocarditis, other cardiac issues, cancer and so much more,” Macie asserted. “And on top of that, it’s time to offer [service members] something besides fast food and the other trash provided to help bring the force back to its full strength.”
Having viewed the alarming data provided by Macie, WND also spoke to former U.S. Army public affairs officer Dr. Chase Spears. Having left the service just recently, in 2023, the retired major admitted that part of the Army experience is “fitness based” and Defense Secretary Hegseth is right to be concerned. There are body weight and fitness requirements, and these are based on age and gender, for example.
Spears shared that “while the Army has always had standards to be met, I saw people throughout my 20-year career that were clearly overweight.” These service members were scattered throughout all ranks. However, Spears told WND, it was also “understood that if some people were a high enough rank, they definitely weren’t held to the standard.” As an example, he pointed to the overweight appearance of Gen. (ret.) Mark Milley, who previously served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
For Dr. Spears, the obesity issue in the military is threefold. One, the current fitness standard is “very generous” and there are still people failing to meet this standard. Two, the importance of good nutrition is being ignored. And finally, he said, “it goes back to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s ‘No Walking on Eggshells Policy.’”
To that end, on Monday, Hegseth signed a policy to implement one of the latest reforms to the military since taking office. Officially titled “Restoring Good Order and Discipline Through Balanced Accountability,” he also affectionately dubbed this latest move as “The No More Walking on Eggshells Policy.”
In a video posted on Fox News, Hegseth said the reform “directs a comprehensive review of equal opportunity programs to ensure prompt and impartial investigations, fair treatment to all parties involved, and timely and appropriate resolution of allegations of discrimination.”
Regarding Spears’ third observation about obesity in the military, he added, “I’m not sure Hegseth realizes it or not, but this conversation ties directly to this policy. There’s been a breakdown of discipline the last few years, and it’s the grievance culture that has completely shattered it.”
Spears also explained the difficulty of “calling out” service members of the opposite sex, people of color or those of higher rank. “Heaven help you if you say something, because the current grievance system is going to go into full effect against you,” he explained. “If you tell a soldier you want to talk about his or her weight, you’re putting yourself at risk of an [equal opportunity] investigation against yourself.”
Despite what he sees as a few potential shortcomings, Spears affirmed that what Hegseth is offering is “absolutely key to being able to perform a military task, whether combat related or not.” He added, “You want people who have the mental acuity that comes with a physically fit body to be able to make decisions under stress.”
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
