Reagan Conrad

After seeing two completely different examples from the animal kingdom, I couldn't help but think about the value of human life and why we often view it so differently. From chick embryos to baby kangaroos, these incredible examples of early life raise some important questions about consistency and the humanity of the unborn, so lets dive in. -RC

Postpartum has been one of the most beautiful and unexpected seasons of my life. In this video, I want to share what this journey has really been like and some of the lessons I've learned along the way. If you've experienced postpartum yourself or you're preparing for it, I'd love to hear your perspective. Let's dive in. -RC

Our food wasn't always full of chemicals, preservatives, seed oils- you name it. The ingredient lists are full of words we can't even pronounce let alone know what they really are. Yet, we eat these foods daily. I talked with MASA chips founder Steven Rofrano to learn more about the history of our food and the steps that are being taken to reverse course and improve the health of our nation!

The U.S. food system has devolved into a massive, unintentional science experiment, and we’ve unknowingly become the lab rats. This isn’t something new, either. It’s been going on for well over a century. We have access to the most advanced medical technology, the most life-saving medicines, and more knowledge about germs and infection than at any other point in human history. So why is our health as a nation declining so rapidly?Here’s a number that should stop you cold. In the 1930s, roughly 1 in 5 Americans had a chronic illness, and that count included things we don’t even tally anymore, like visual impairment. Today, without counting visual impairment at all, it’s closer to 3 in 5. That’s a jump of roughly 40 percentage points, and most of those chronic illnesses can be connected directly to food and lifestyle. That is not a coincidence, and it is not something that “just happened” to us.I wanted to understand exactly how we got here, so I sat down with Steven Rofrano, CEO and co-founder of Ancient Crunch, the company behind Masa chips, tortilla chips made with whole-food ingredients and fried in grass-fed beef tallow. Steven is on the leading edge of making snack food real food again, and he doesn’t need a research budget to make his case.“Go pick up some history book and just look at photos of people,” he told me. “You don’t need a doctor to tell you that someone with like 32 perfectly straight white teeth who never had braces and is like six foot two, who lives in the jungle of wherever … you don’t need a doctor to tell you that person’s healthier than the average person today. It’s just so obvious if you look.”It really is obvious once you look back. Not that long ago, in the early 1900s, Americans were shopping at local mom-and-pop grocers within walking distance of home, stocked with local goods because refrigerated transportation didn’t exist to move food any real distance. There were butchers, milkmen, cheese shops. Actual specialists, not aisles. The “classic American diet” of that era, as Steven put it, consisted of staple carbohydrates like potatoes, corn, and wheat; fats like butter and pork; beef once it caught on in the mid-1800s; and whatever vegetables happened to be in season. That was it. Those were your options. “The additives that we are trying to avoid now … it just didn’t exist,” he said. “Citric acid? What citric acid? Red 40? What Red 40? There wasn’t any of this stuff.”Then the grocery stores got bigger, and bigger stores needed longer shelf life. That’s the moment preservatives, chemicals, and seed oils entered the American diet, and it wasn’t some accident of nature. It was three forces working at once: the Green Revolution of the 1960s, which used pesticides, GMOs, and fertilizers to massively increase agricultural output; a wave of new food additives designed to extend shelf life and cut costs; and a food system that rewarded whoever could sell the cheapest calories, regardless of what those calories did to the people eating them. Cheap food was, and still is, treated as a kind of God-given right in this country. The market gave us exactly what we asked for.Nowhere is that clearer than in the story of seed oil, which now makes up roughly 30% of all American calories. It is by far the single biggest processed ingredient anyone eats, by volume, nationwide. And the origin story is almost too strange to believe. In the 1870s, a German immigrant invented a method for pressing oil out of cottonseed, which until then was just a waste byproduct of the cotton industry. Procter & Gamble, the soap company, bought the process because they were looking for a cheaper alternative to the fats used in soapmaking. But the oil itself was, in Steven’s words, “kind of gross … foamy and smelled weird,” so it got shelved. Eventually someone figured out how to process it into a solid fat that resembled lard or butter at room temperature, and somebody at Procter & Gamble had the idea to just sell it as a cooking fat instead of soap. That product became Crisco, marketed in the early 20th century as clean, modern, and “enlightened” at a moment when people actually associated processed and chemical with progress rather than danger. Liquid seed oils got a second life during World War II as machinery lubricant. When the war ended, the oil-seed producers were sitting on a mountain of surplus supply, and that’s when they started selling it as food.What’s almost more disturbing than the ingredient itself is how it stayed unquestioned for so long. Steven pointed out that billions of dollars of industry-funded research over the past several decades have gone into cementing the idea that seed oils are good for you. Studies get funded on whatever someone has a financial interest in proving. Nobody is spending serious money studying whether kombucha is good for you, he noted, not because kombucha is bad, but because nobody profits from that research. The same imbalance applies here, at a much larger scale, and it should make you a little more skeptical of the “settled science” you see stamped on a cereal box.Naturally, I asked Steven whether it’s actually possible to feed this many people without relying on cheap, unhealthy ingredients. His answer surprised me: current farming isn’t even optimized for total calories per acre, let alone nutritious calories per acre. It’s optimized for profit per farm, which is a completely different calculation. Regenerative farming, which rotates cattle and pasture and lets animals shape the land and cycle nutrients back into it instead of leaning on pesticides, can produce more healthy calories per acre than conventional monoculture. “It is relatively easy to conceive of a structure of managing farmland that could produce even more food than we’re currently producing. It would be healthier,” Steven said. “It just might not be as cheap or maybe not as profitable.”So what do you actually do with all of this? Steven’s advice is refreshingly simple. Avoid seed oils and high-fructose corn syrup. “If you just avoid those two things, like 90% of the things that are bad for you will automatically, by default, get kicked out,” he said. His broader rule of thumb: if you can’t imagine an ingredient sitting in your great-grandmother’s cupboard, don’t eat it. You don’t need to know what maltodextrin or carrageenan actually is. You just need to know your great-grandmother didn’t either.And on the cost question, because there’s always a cost question, Steven reframed it in a way I haven’t stopped thinking about. Most Americans now spend only about 10% of their money on food, a fraction of what our ancestors did. So increasing your food budget by 50% might raise your total household spending by only about 5%. At a certain point, you have to ask yourself what you actually want, and what you’re willing to trade for it. The answer to our modern health problems will not be found in convenience. It takes some sacrifice, and sometimes some money; what we have collectively been willing to sacrifice at the altar of convenience and cost is, intentionally or not, our own health, our futures, and our most valuable resource: our limited time here.The good news is that the shift is already underway, and not just in my own kitchen. With huge credit to the moms of the movement, major grocery chains like Target are banning certain food dyes. Fast-food chains are advertising that they cook with tallow. Hershey’s has pledged to go back to using real chocolate. This isn’t a fringe, overprotective-parents movement anymore. It’s becoming mainstream, and if brands want to keep their customers, they’re going to have to get with the times.I feel this shift in my own life, too. Eating foods that were completely normal for me just a few years ago genuinely tastes bad to me now. Same with my husband. It felt like a long process of rewiring our brains, but once you actually know and care what you’re eating, you stop being a passive consumer of whatever’s on the shelf or in the commercial in front of you. I look at supermarket shelves in a completely different light now, and it forces me to get creative with the whole foods that are actually available. It’s less convenient, yes, but it’s entirely possible. It may feel like an antiquated idea in 2026, but we can even grow some of our own food for close to free, on a balcony or in a backyard.This is our health we’re talking about. How can we call ourselves a strong nation if we’re this sick? It’s not normal, and we need to stop pretending it is. We need to look for small ways to cut the excuses and take back control of our health in the most natural ways possible. Start by getting out of the rat race. Stop feeling like a drugged-up lab rat, and instead lean back into the traditions of our ancestors, for the sake of our health, our longevity, and our overall well-being. It’s worth it.

A video I recently made about motherhood triggered some feminists on the internet while other women resonated with it. To the women who didn’t believe what I said, I decided to take a dive back into early feminist literature to highlight my point and also emphasize why the early feminist's framework on motherhood is still affecting our culture today. -RC

When I talk publicly about how raising my baby is beautiful, not oppressive, feminists get mad. We never said that! they claim. To that I can only ask, Have you read second-wave feminist literature? Second-wave feminists did, in fact, call motherhood oppressive.And ever since the ’60s, the media’s advertising for the role hasn’t been particularly good. Culture followed the feminists’ lead by portraying motherhood in an unfavorable light — both in obvious and more subtle ways. The prevailing messages always seem to reiterate the same point: Having children will ruin your life and strip you of your freedom forever.It’s just as evident in today’s media as it was decades ago. While on maternity leave, I started watching three different shows. Each one introduced a pregnancy storyline, and in every case, the female lead chose to abort her baby. For one, it wasn’t the right time. For another, it would ruin her career. For the third, she wouldn’t be able to attend her dream school.The state of modern television is just one of the many examples of the oppressive messaging that still permeates the media. Motherhood is portrayed as such a terrible fate that it is presented as better to terminate the life of your baby than to become a mother. As a new mom, holding my sleeping baby, I turned off each of those shows. The juxtaposition between what the media was telling me and what I was actually experiencing was striking.Motherhood has far exceeded my already high expectations. Looking at my son’s face, I couldn’t find the oppression. It unlocked a million new horizons — new highs and even new lows — but most importantly, it brought a precious new human being into my life, one I have the privilege of raising and calling my own. There is no “sentence” more beautiful than that.So, from my nursery rocking chair, I recorded a simple video on social media saying so. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Reagan Conrad Rohrbach (@reaganconrad)Since then, women have made their own videos highlighting moments from their lives as mothers using my video’s audio, while another corner of the internet has taken personal offense. Many feminists responded with videos declaring, “We never said that.” That’s odd because I didn’t even use the word feminist. But perhaps they recognized that the language I criticized did, in fact, stem from their movement.“They” did, in fact, say that.It wasn’t difficult to dive into feminist literature from the 1960s and 1970s and find numerous direct quotes from influential figures saying that motherhood is oppressive. Shulamith Firestone wrote in her 1970 book “The Dialectic of Sex,” “The heart of a woman’s oppression is her childbearing and childrearing roles.”Other notable examples include quotes from prominent feminist writers equating fetuses to parasites and describing domestic life as “comfortable concentration camps.” The list goes on and on, so much so that I made an entire video outlining my findings.Perhaps one takeaway from the current outrage is that many people are no longer reading the rhetoric of their movement’s icons from decades ago. Or perhaps they want to distance themselves from their more radical predecessors and present a more peaceful picture of what their movement represents.Probably not, but one can hope. Considering that the modern feminist movement still celebrates what I view as one of the most heinous practices in the United States, I doubt it. It always comes back to abortion.For a movement to justify such an act, motherhood must still be portrayed, directly or indirectly, as oppression. Only if motherhood is seen as a fate worse than death does the argument for ending an unborn child’s life become coherent (though still deeply flawed). They may not say it as bluntly anymore, but I believe the core tenets from sexual revolution authors to modern-day influencers remain the same.As for me, I’ll stick with another message for the masses: Motherhood is the most important role I will ever have, and it is not oppression. Motherhood is simply the best.***This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

I love a good true crime documentary as much as anyone, but lately I've been asking myself if our obsession has gone too far. From binge-watching murder documentaries to treating real cases like entertainment, I wanted to take a deeper look at how true crime may be shaping the way we think, feel, and respond to real-world violence.

Americans are obsessed with true crime. “Crime Junkie” is still one of the biggest podcasts in the world. The Idaho murders documentary just hit number one on Netflix.When I was growing up, true crime was my favorite genre. I would sit inside with my friends on hot summer days to watch the latest episodes of “SVU” and all things Olivia Benson. I’d be embarrassed to count up how many hours of my life I spent listening to true crime podcasts. Name one, and I’ve probably spent 10 hours of my life learning all about it.But if you pause and think about it, the idea of saying, “I love true crime,” is actually bizarre. The real world is heavy enough without going out of our way to seek out even more darkness just for the sake of entertainment. Just a scroll through TikTok and I will see stories of girls talking about how someone stalked them or questioning if a weird encounter they had was a sign of human trafficking. Flip on local news, and the top stories will be last night’s shooting. After listening to true crime podcasts and books almost daily during my early twenties, the concept of what I was really consuming dawned on me. How much is this affecting my health and how I see the world?Considering the TV true crime demographic is 80% female, I know I’m far from the only one facing this dilemma. Psychology Today cites women’s need for understanding the murderers’ motives as a means of making them less scary, as a reason for our morbid curiosity. Experts also say we want to be more aware and informed if we are ever to find ourselves in a similar situation. It makes sense. Often, the girls who get out of bizarre scenarios cite their true crime obsession as a lifesaving tool.The education component is indeed a useful tool for an otherwise senseless matter. I think some shows glamorize and monetize other people’s suffering for the sake of entertainment, while there are better options that seek to educate and inform rather than harp on every gory detail of a crime.My biggest concern with our undying love for dark subject matter is how it seems to desensitize humans to real-life suffering and evil. It reminds me of the way people attribute video games to desensitization. Whats worse about true crime is it’s true crime. Real people’s lives.Mix in our obsession with the internet’s need to comment on every single detail, and a crime will quickly turn into everyone’s next conspiracy theory on TikTok. Every viewer now needs to become the entertainer: sharing her insights into the possible perpetrators of the crime even when there is no evidence to suggest it.Take the Idaho murder case, four students slain in their off-campus house. The now infamous house was also home to two young women who survived the horrors. Within hours of the details reaching social media, the innocent roommates became prime suspects in the eyes of TikTok sleuths. No decorum or empathy displayed toward real survivors of a real horror. In reporting on real-life evil, we partake in downright evil gossip ourselves.The online activity around Charlie Kirk’s assassination follow eerily similar patterns as well. Just because the salacious content scratches the itch of a generation obsessed with true crime, that doesn’t make the content right, morally or factually.When I took a step back from the true crime gossip, a striking question filled the void. Isn’t there anything better you can fill your brain with? The answer, of course, was yes. You become what you consume. If I’m consuming darkness, how do I plan to shine the light?Now I ask myself, is this just gossip and gore? If so, I steer clear. And so far, the switch-up has done wonders for my health, the way I view the world, and the way I can still operate joyfully within it.***This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

The Savannah Bananas have exploded onto the scene with their eclectic and non stop entertainment style of baseball known as Banana Ball. You’ve probably seen them all over social media. After wanting to get to a Bananaball game for YEARS, I finally made it inside the most exciting, chaotic and captivating ball parks in the country by going behind the scenes. Come with me as we dive into the Banana Ball phenomenon.

One of the craziest plays in sports history happened last week. Robert Anthony Cruz caught a fly ball in the outfield mid-backflip. Yep, mid-backflip. Now, why would a baseball player be doing a backflip while a ball was flying toward him? Well, he plays Banana Ball.For those not immediately familiar with the term, Banana Ball is a new version of baseball created by the Savannah Bananas. The founder of the Bananas, Jesse Cole, owned a collegiate summer baseball team back in 2016. The team was struggling to get people into the seats of its small Savannah ballpark.Cole, a former college baseball player, decided that if he wanted people to come to the game, he had to make the in-person experience more compelling. So he started incorporating skits and additional games into the game itself. He encouraged players to attempt trick plays whenever possible. He had pitchers lead full-fledged dance routines from the mound.The ballpark in Savannah was no longer empty. There were no seats left to fill. Soon, the team had evolved so much that it needed to form an entirely new league around this style of baseball. And Banana Ball was born.Then the pandemic hit, and another challenge began. So the teams took their dances and skits online, posting them all over TikTok. And the team exploded again.Today, the league has multiple teams that play against the Bananas, including the Party Animals, the Firefighters, and the Texas Tailgaters. They play in some of the largest MLB and NFL stadiums in the country. And those games sell out, too. To get your hands on a ticket, the waitlist has grown to more than four million people. I would know. I joined it a few years ago.I’ve been following the team’s journey for several years, and a few months ago, I finally got to experience Banana Ball for myself — including getting a behind-the-scenes look at how the whole thing operates.And the entire operation is every bit as elaborate and well-oiled as I expected.Cole reminds me of the modern-day P.T. Barnum. He has created a circus-like sport that blends genuine baseball talent with nonstop entertainment. He’s turned his players into influencer-athletes and, perhaps most impressively, figured out the secret formula to going viral.But I went into this thinking the entire operation was ultimately about racking up views on social media. I realized I was wrong. The end goal isn’t internet fame. It’s getting those fans off their phones and into the stands. One billion fans, to be exact.To do that, Cole has built the entire game around a fan-first mentality. He has customized virtually every part of the experience around what he thinks people actually want from a night at the ballpark. It feels like the exact experience you would want as a kid going to your first big game.From the moment you walk in and get to meet your favorite players on the field, to the music, the pace of the game, the nonstop entertainment, and even the relatively affordable tickets, Cole has taken the elements he loves about baseball and transformed them into an entirely new kind of entertainment.Of course, not everyone loves it. Some fans of traditional MLB are skeptical of the whole thing. And fair enough. But Banana Ball is a very different kind of game. It’s built for an era where attention spans are shorter, and entertainment is competing with the entire internet for your attention. But I think Banana Ball belongs in a slightly different category than Major League Baseball. It’s closer to Cirque du Soleil or the Harlem Globetrotters — an entertainment experience built around an existing sport. And even though the rules and delivery are completely different, Banana Ball is doing something interesting: It’s giving an old game new attention from a younger generation.Kids are picking up baseball bats because they fell in love with Banana Ball. And when viral content actually translates into kids playing the sport in real life, that’s a win.Sometimes, I find myself feeling pretty jaded about internet virality. So much of what goes viral can feel disingenuous, irrelevant, or completely unworthy of the attention it receives. Refreshingly, Banana Ball feels different. The end goal isn’t the number on a phone screen. It’s the number of humans in the seats. Tens of thousands of people are sitting next to strangers, laughing, singing Coldplay, and experiencing something together.In a culture where so much of our entertainment is consumed alone, through a screen, we need more of those moments, the kind that get people out of their houses and into the same place, cheering for something together. So when the Bananas come back to my city, you’ll know where to find me.***This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.