President Donald Trump shared the first photo Monday morning of the new baby boy welcomed by the Vance family. “Congratulations! A perfect baby boy for the wonderful Vance family,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Monday alongside a photo of two of the older Vance children holding their new baby brother.      Trump’s congratulatory post comes after Vice President JD Vance and second lady Usha Vance announced the birth of Alec Neel Vance on Sunday.  “Usha and the baby are happy and healthy, and our kids are overjoyed to meet their little brother,” Vance said. “The incredible military doctors and staff members of Walter Reed Medical Center and the White House Medical Unit have been a blessing. We are deeply thankful for all they have done for our family.” The Vance’s other kids include Ewan (9), Vivek (6), and Mirabel (4).  No child has been born to a sitting vice president since a son was born in 1870 to Vice President Schuyler Colfax during President Ulysses S. Grant’s administration. The Vances previously discussed how the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was close to the vice president, influenced their decision to have another child. In the aftermath of Kirk’s death, Erika Kirk told Usha that she had regretted not having more children. “I think it really heightened JD’s sense that he’d been talking about this for a while, this sense that there was this possibility of having another kid whom he could love as much as the three that we had,” Usha said. “It really did crystallize for [him], that sense that if you could have that other child, then you would have nothing to regret. And if we couldn’t have that other child, then we were very happy with the children that we had. So it was very powerful what she said about her own family and certainly very moving to both of us.” Vance is not expected to take any formal time off, but will work more from the vice president’s residence.

Hard-Left actor Mark Ruffalo got shellacked on social media over the weekend after taking a self-righteous swipe at tech billionaire Elon Musk, with critics blasting the wealthy star for his stunning hypocrisy and total lack of self-awareness. The “Avengers” star ignited a digital firestorm when he posted a cartoon titled “Elon Musk dines alone.” The cartoon depicted Musk sitting before a lavish feast, asking a starving young child across the table, “What are you staring at, African kid?” To which the child responds: “Sorry, I don’t mean to be rude, but I haven’t eaten since you killed USAID.” Ruffalo wagged his finger at Musk, writing, “Hello @ElonMusk. This is how you are perceived. Not too late to course correct but it’s getting pretty late. You certainly have the extra money on hand to really help the people of the world instead of the hellbent road of chaos and destruction you are ludicrously barreling down.” Hello @ElonMusk. This is how you are perceived. Not too late to course correct but it’s getting pretty late. You certainly have the extra money on hand to really help the people of the world instead of the hellbent road of chaos and destruction you are ludicrously barreling down.… pic.twitter.com/O5ndSZzz7Q — Mark Ruffalo (@MarkRuffalo) July 18, 2026 Social media users weren’t buying the A-lister’s virtue-signaling and immediately ripped the multi-millionaire actor to shreds. “Lecturing others while sitting on tens of millions yourself is peak Hollywood,” fired back one commenter, noting Ruffalo’s estimated $35 million net worth and his $7 million Manhattan penthouse. “You could donate $25-30 million tomorrow and still live an extremely comfortable life. … You need a basic economics lesson and a mirror, because your hypocrisy is matched only by your lack of self-awareness.” Others brought cold, hard receipts to expose the actor’s lecture, pointing out that Musk’s personal charitable giving totals roughly $8.2 billion to $8.5 billion over the years. In 2024 alone, the Musk Foundation granted $474 million to causes like pediatric research and STEM education, while SpaceX donated tens of millions in Starlink satellite terminals to keep Ukraine connected during Russian attacks. “What percentage of your $35M net worth have you moved to effective causes at similar scale? Or is drawing memes the contribution?” another user blasted. Hey @MarkRuffalo Cute cartoon, but facts: Elon transferred billions in Tesla stock to the Musk Foundation (now over $14B+ assets). 2024 alone: $474M granted, record year, heavy on STEM education and paediatric research ($55M to St. Jude). Also funded carbon removal tech via… — Mor Edge Insight (@MorEdge_Insight) July 18, 2026 Ruffalo’s defense of USAID also raised eyebrows, given the agency’s notorious track record of wasteful spending before its functions were absorbed by the State Department. Lists of dubious government spending by USAID have revealed taxpayer dollars flowing into absurd projects, including $20 million for an Iraqi version of “Sesame Street,” $1.5 million for “diversity, equity, and inclusion” in Serbia, $68,000 for dance classes in Wuhan, China, and funds that paid for Ukrainian fashion models to attend Paris Fashion Week. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) revealed that millions of dollars intended for humanitarian aid ended up diverted to terrorists in Syria, while other lawmakers raised concerns about funds going to terrorists in Gaza. Critics left Ruffalo with a simple reality check: if he’s so concerned about global hunger, he should put his own millions where his mouth is. As one user bluntly put it: “If you think people need to be fed who aren’t, why don’t you feed them?” You're worth 35 million dollars. If you think people need to be fed who aren't, why don't you feed them? Feel free to go into debt to do it, which is what you're asking the country to do….and if you're saying, "Why does it have to me?" That's the same question we're asking. — John Hawkins (@johnhawkinsrwn) July 18, 2026

The Department of War on Monday released the names of two U.S. Army soldiers killed during an Iranian attack on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan last week. Those killed were 1st Lt. Tyler James Feehan, 25, of Ewa Beach, Hawaii, and Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, 19, of Carrollton, Texas, according to the Pentagon. Feehan was killed in action on July 18, while Gonzales was killed in action on July 17 during an enemy attack on the base. The Department of War said the incident remains under investigation. Feehan was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 55th Air Defense Artillery Regiment, 32nd Army Air Missile Defense Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Gonzales was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 57th Air Defense Artillery Regiment, 52nd Air Defense Artillery Brigade, 10th Army Air Missile Defense Command in Ansbach, Germany. On Sunday, U.S. Central Command said it had recovered unidentified remains in Jordan while searching for a service member who had been reported missing following the July 17 Iranian attack. Officials said the identification process is ongoing. CENTCOM also announced that another U.S. service member was killed in northern Iraq on July 18 during the controlled detonation of unexploded ordnance from a downed Iranian one-way attack drone. A second service member was wounded and is receiving treatment for minor injuries. Officials have not yet released the identities of those troops. Speaking to reporters Sunday night, President Donald Trump said the United States launched another wave of strikes against Iran “in honor” of the American troops killed in Jordan after an Iranian ballistic missile attack. “Well, we feel very badly, but you know those great people, those great patriots, were out there fighting that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said. “Iran has been very, very badly damaged. They’ve lost everything, almost, militarily. They’ve got very little left. They’ve got some missiles. They’ve got some drones. They’ve got some manufacturing ability, not much.” “We control the strait; they don’t control anything,” Trump continued. “So we’ll see what happens. But we hit them very hard again tonight, and we did that in honor of the probably three. It’s probably three as opposed to two great patriots.” After Trump’s remarks, U.S. Central Command announced it had completed its ninth consecutive night of strikes against Iran. According to CENTCOM, U.S. forces targeted Iranian military command centers, air defense and coastal surveillance sites, maritime capabilities, missile and drone launch sites, and communications networks to further diminish Iran’s ability to attack commercial vessels and civilian mariners transiting the Strait of Hormuz. “The U.S. military is holding Iran accountable at the Commander in Chief’s direction,” CENTCOM said. “CENTCOM forces remain highly vigilant, focused, lethal, and ready.” On March 1, an Iranian drone attack on a U.S. base in Kuwait killed Maj. Jeffrey R. O’Brien, Capt. Cody Khork, Chief Warrant Officer 3 Robert Marzan, Sgt. 1st Class Nicole Amor, Sgt. 1st Class Noah Tietjens, and Sgt. Declan Coady,  Army Sgt. Benjamin N. Pennington, 26, of Glendale, Kentucky, died on March 8 from wounds sustained in an Iranian attack on Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia several days earlier. Days later, on March 12, six more service members were killed when a KC-135 refueling aircraft supporting U.S. military operations against Iran crashed in Iraq. Those killed were John A. Klinner, 33, of Auburn, Alabama; Ariana Savino, 31, of Covington, Washington; Ashley Pruitt, 34, of Bardstown, Kentucky; Seth Koval, 38, of Mooresville, Indiana; Curtis Angst, 30, of Wilmington, Ohio; and Tyler Simmons, 28, of Columbus, Ohio. With Monday’s identification of Feehan and Gonzales, at least 15 U.S. service members have now been publicly identified as having died during the conflict with Iran since March. 

If you’ve ever finished a satisfying dinner and found yourself standing in front of the refrigerator 20 minutes later, not out of hunger but out of a relentless mental pull toward food, you already know what food noise is. You just may not have had a name for it. Food noise is the constant, low-grade (or sometimes deafening) mental chatter about food that won’t quiet down, even when your body has had enough. It’s the craving that ambushes you at 9 p.m., the inability to feel truly full, the thought loop that makes resisting certain foods feel like a full-time job. The term is gaining traction because millions of people finally feel seen, and because science is beginning to explain why it happens in the first place. Before we go further, something important needs to be said. Normal hunger is not the enemy here. It is one of the most satisfying and elemental parts of being alive. The anticipation of a good meal, the deep satisfaction of eating well, the way food anchors community and celebration and daily rhythm — these are wholesome and worth celebrating. Strength, satiety, and the pleasure of eating are signs of a body working as it should. What we’re talking about when we say food noise is something different, something that has less to do with real hunger and more to do with a metabolism that has lost its footing. Decades of ultra-processed foods have done something truly damaging to the body’s natural hunger cues. The signals designed to tell us when we’re hungry, satisfied, and done have been disrupted in ways that, for many people, genuinely require healing rather than simply more willpower. But here’s what most diet culture gets wrong: Food noise isn’t a character flaw. For many people, it has a biological root.  When we eat, our gut releases small hormones called incretins, primarily GLP-1, GIP, and PYY. These peptides travel through the gut-brain axis and signal the brain’s “full” receptors, creating that calm, satisfied feeling after a meal. Think of them as your body’s natural volume dial on food noise. Not everyone’s dial works the same way, though. Some people genetically produce fewer of these hormones. Others have fewer receptors for them, meaning even a normal amount of GLP-1 doesn’t register as strongly. Add in aging, estrogen loss, or a long history of restrictive dieting, and that dial can get stuck on loud. A landmark 2011 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that even a full year after weight loss from strict dieting, subjects still had significantly suppressed incretin hormone levels. Chronic dieting doesn’t just fail; it can biologically amplify the very food noise that makes eating wisely harder. The diet industry has been blaming people for falling off the wagon when it was actually pushing them off. So what about GLP-1 medications like semaglutide (Ozempic, Wegovy) and tirzepatide (Mounjaro, Zepbound)? For the right people, they can be genuinely life-changing. Called “mimetics,” they mimic the body’s own incretin hormones but are engineered to last much longer in the system, keeping those satiety signals circulating well beyond a normal meal. The result, for many, is a mental calm around food they may never have experienced before.  Still, these medications are most appropriate for those whose struggles persist even after diet and lifestyle are genuinely dialed in. They work best alongside a protein-anchored diet and strength training, and aggressive dosing can backfire, suppressing appetite so dramatically that people skip meals, lose muscle, and slow their metabolism. The goal is to turn food noise down, not off. For those looking to support their body’s own incretin output naturally, the strategies are straightforward and well-researched. Bioavailable animal protein is the most powerful lever. A 2020 study published in Diabetes Metabolism Research & Reviews compared a plant-based diet to a Mediterranean diet that included animal proteins and found that subjects had significantly higher GLP-1 levels after Mediterranean meals than vegetarian ones. What else can help your body produce more of its own GLP-1? Fermented and fiber-rich foods like kefir, sauerkraut, oats, and beans feed the gut bacteria that produce GLP-1, and a thriving microbiome can meaningfully turn down the volume on food noise over time.  Exercise matters too, particularly strength training. A 2025 study in the Frontiers in Clinical Diabetes and Healthcare found that exercise increases GLP-1 levels by up to 37%, and the muscle mass built through consistent training further improves insulin sensitivity, compounding the effect.  And perhaps most counterintuitively, severe restriction makes food noise louder, not quieter. Eating enough is a biological necessity, not a reward to be earned. Food noise is not a moral failing; it’s a hormonal conversation between your gut and your brain, one that science is only beginning to understand. For some, that conversation needs medical support. For most, however, strategic nutrition and lifestyle changes can move the needle meaningfully. For almost everyone, understanding why the noise is there is the first step toward finding peace with food and reclaiming the deep, simple pleasure that eating was always meant to be. *** Pearl Barrett and Serene Allison are the founders of Trim Healthy Mama and New York Times bestselling authors of the forthcoming title “The 7 Skills to Lasting Health.” 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.

Every shift I’ve worked in the emergency department, I’ve seen the downstream consequences of America’s obesity epidemic. I see the 52-year-old father having a massive heart attack, or the diabetic foot infection that ends in an amputation, or the stroke that steals someone’s ability to speak to their loved ones, or the dialysis patient whose life is scheduled around a machine three days a week. By the time obesity reaches my emergency department, it’s no longer about vanity; it’s about people’s lives permanently changing or even prematurely ending. For decades, physicians had few effective tools beyond telling patients to eat less and exercise more, a prescription that is technically correct but woefully inadequate against a food environment engineered to maximize consumption. GLP-1’s have flipped that entire conversation on its head. For millions of Americans living with obesity and diabetes, these drugs have been transformative. Patients who spent years cycling through diets and medications are finally losing meaningful weight, improving their blood sugar, lowering their cardiovascular risk, and reclaiming their health. But as remarkable as the clinical results around GLP-1s have been, people still tend to misunderstand how and why they work. Most Americans think of GLP-1s as appetite suppressants. You get full after one slice of pizza instead of two, so you lose weight, but that’s only half of the story. GLP-1 receptors are found not only throughout the digestive tract, but also in many regions of the brain involved in appetite and reward; they block the ability of your brain to anticipate and perceive pleasure from food, among other things. This is something wholly different than suppressing hunger. This is no longer about weight loss so much as it is something entirely more personal: motivation. That second slice of pizza may still taste good, but you just don’t want it now. That is not a drug acting solely on the gut. It is a drug acting on the mind. The implications of this are gobsmacking and reach well beyond obesity. Early studies suggest similar effects on alcohol, gambling, and other compulsive behaviors. For the first time, medicine isn’t simply treating disease; it’s beginning to change the motivational systems that drive human behavior. And that possibility forces us to ask a much bigger question. In the dystopian novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley wrote of a society that sought to eliminate suffering through chemistry and genetic engineering. Citizens took a drug called soma, which didn’t cure disease so much as silence dissatisfaction itself. Huxley wasn’t really writing about pharmaceuticals, but asking what happens when chemistry replaces the cultivation of virtue and resilience to silence human pain and suffering. For decades, that question lay in the realm of science fiction. Today, it no longer does. GLP-1s are obviously not soma. They don’t manufacture happiness, and for millions of Americans struggling with obesity and diabetes, they are genuinely life-changing medicines that reduce suffering and save lives. But Huxley understood something that neuroscience is only beginning to explain: that changing desire can actually change behavior. For too long, our politics has framed obesity as a choice on one side and a disease on the other. The truth, as it often is, is more complicated. Those who argue that discipline, responsibility, and self-control matter are correct. But biology matters too. Anyone who has treated obesity understands that hunger and reward are not simply matters of willpower. If you’ve ever wanted to snack more or binge after an all-nighter, then you know biology can make good choices dramatically harder. That is why we should resist both extremes. One extreme dismisses GLP-1s as another “miracle cure” sold by Big Pharma. The other imagines that a weekly injection can replace the hard work of building health. Both are false gods. America’s chronic disease epidemic did not emerge because millions of people simultaneously lost their moral compass. It emerged because we’ve spent generations constructing a nutritional ecosystem that funnels the average American toward metabolic disease, and no injection can solve that problem on its own. Disease begins with what we eat, how we sleep, how we move, and a food environment that has been, for decades, making processed calories cheaper, more addictive, and more accessible than real nutrition. The Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement is rightly focused on those upstream causes. GLP-1s should complement that mission, not compete with it. Patients taking GLP-1s still need resistance training, adequate protein, better nutrition, better sleep, and sustainable lifestyle changes. Without those foundations, weight loss can come at the expense of strength, resilience, and long-term health. A GLP-1 can make healthier choices easier, but it can’t make them unnecessary. But this is not a one-drug story. Eli Lilly’s retatrutide, which works on 3 different receptors instead of 1, now in Phase 3 trials, has already shown weight loss north of 24% in earlier studies — well beyond what semaglutide or tirzepatide deliver. An oral GLP-1 pill, orforglipron, is moving through late-stage trials that could eliminate the injection altogether. Those are just two names in a pipeline that now includes several hundred peptide-based therapeutics in active clinical development, touching everything from dental cavities to aging to neurodegeneration. This is the beginning of a new category of medicine, and the model we build for GLP-1s today will shape the peptide therapies that follow. Get it wrong by subsidizing the drug while skipping the protocol, and we’ll repeat this debate with every new breakthrough. That’s why public policy should reward treatment, not merely prescriptions. If Medicare and Medicaid are going to cover GLP-1s, coverage should include meaningful nutrition counseling, resistance training, metabolic monitoring, and measurable outcomes. And it should always be under the oversight of a licensed physician. Taxpayer dollars should purchase health, not dependency. Huxley feared a future in which we would wield chemistry to negate human struggle, thereby diluting what it means to be human. GLP-1s are not that future. They are remarkable medicines treating devastating diseases. As a physician, I’ve seen too much preventable suffering to dismiss a therapy that can keep patients out of the emergency department. But medicine is crossing an important threshold as we develop drugs that will influence motivation, reward, and desire themselves. That is an extraordinary scientific achievement, but it also demands extraordinary wisdom. We know GLP-1s work, but they cannot replace the habits, character, and choices that allow people to flourish. The question at hand is whether we’ll use them to support health or to substitute for it. Those are two very different futures. And unlike Huxley’s world, we still have the freedom to choose between them. *** Dr. Benjamin Chacko is an Emergency Medicine Physician and the father of two sons.