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ACCORDING TO LIZ - One of the health crises of recent years has been the explosion of obesity and diabetes among Americans, especially among those who have the least access to healthcare and the fewest tools to manage the associated medical problems.
More than 80% of parents support the child food and nutrition positions of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s often otherwise controversial Make America Healthy Again agenda.
In an admirable statement on how to combat the current childhood chronic disease epidemic, Kennedy called for the realignment of “our food and health systems, driving education, and unleashing science to protect America’s children and families… ending the corporate capture of public health, restoring transparency, and putting gold-standard science – not special interests – at the center of every decision.”
Kennedy, Trump’s Hand in Health and Human Services, has been on a rampage to overhaul health regulations in his conspiracy-warped world.
While acknowledging the dangers of ultra-processed foods that Big Ag and their henchmen lobbyists in government have been pushing on the public for generations, he has done little more than rail at a fraction of the causes such as synthetic dyes and corn syrup-laced fast foods.
All the worse because these are cheaper than healthy alternatives, and government policies are quickly eradicating programs for the poor.
Proposals in Kennedy’s September 20-page “Make Our Children Healthy Again” [[[https://www.whitehouse.gov/maha/]]] report also include defining ultra-processed food, concerns about toxic chemicals in our food and water and air, revising dietary guidelines, banning petroleum-based food dyes, updating nutrition labels, and modernizing infant formula standards.
It's heavy on prioritizing research, realigning incentives, increasing public awareness and fostering private sector collaboration – all make-work activities designed to please the public eye.
What it doesn’t do is set specifics or lay out concrete steps with specific deadlines or take effective action against all those harms about which it rails.
It doesn’t do what Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico have already done, applying tobacco-style warning labels to ultra-processed foods in their countries.
Furthermore, with the call for collaboration with corporate America, just how much will actually be accomplished when facing off against the financial power of the private sector where the focus is profit, not health.
And, instead of targeting the underlying causes of many of the toxins polluting our food and water, Kennedy defends the current pesticide review system and implies that the real issue rests with delay in approval of even more pesticides.
Say what?
So far, any MACHA efforts to ameliorate food industry-driven ailments affecting American children has generated more hot air than a trainload of Twinkies.
Meanwhile, favorite Trump punching bag Gavin Newsome has signed a number of laws putting California’s children a few steps ahead in actually addressing this crisis.
Earlier this month, he signed Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel’s Real Food, Healthy Kids Act directing the California Department of Public Health to identify ultra-processed foods that pose the greatest health risks to students and remove the most harmful from school menus by 2035.
Scientists working with University of California experts will be deputized to identify restricted foods and those of concern based on scientific evidence – something rarely mentioned in the Trump-Kennedy lexicon – and if products contain additives banned, restricted or carry warnings in other jurisdictions; if research has linked the product or its ingredients to cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes or other health issues; and if it contributes to food addiction.
Better nutrition begins at home, but every kid wants to be with the in crowd so even the best efforts of parents fail in the face of peer pressure. Going after nutrition in the schools is a huge step in the right direction.
Schools should not serve students foods filled with dangerous chemical additives, and California is leading the nation with this bipartisan, science-based approach will start to phase out restricted and ultra-processed foods no later than July 1, 2029, and prohibit vendors from offering such foods to schools after July 1, 2032.
Other child health-oriented bills previously promoted by Jesse Gabriel and signed into law by the governor include the 2023 “Skittles ban” stopping the sale and distribution of foods containing additives already identified as dangerous such as brominated vegetable oil and Red Dye No. 3.
And last year a ban barred the use of synthetic food dyes Blue 1, Blue 2, Green 3, Red 40, Yellow 5, Yellow 6 and Titanium Dioxide from all foods served and sold to pupils, following a 2021 study that concluded these “can result in hyperactivity and other neuro-behavioral problems in some children.”
Titanium Dioxide is a whitening agent used in various products such as sunscreen, paints, coatings... and in eye-catching brightly colored junk foods in school cafeterias.
These new California state laws, concretely addressing issues the MACHA men only talk about, will hopefully push other states to advocate in a similar manner for their children.
As the MACHA men posit, the core issues driving the “childhood chronic disease crisis” in the United States are, indeed, poor diet, chemical exposure, lack of physical activity, chronic stress, and over-medication.
Ultimately all five can be addressed with better and more stringent government guidelines.
Disease is not an inevitable byproduct of a particular exposure or an inevitable outgrowth of modernization or industrialization, but the direct result of decisions made by individuals, groups, and a society which all too often creates conditions that affect different classes of people disproportionately.
And, since Kennedy’s actions will continue to be strictly curtailed by the Trump regime’s prominent support for those big-donor multinationals profiting hand over fist from ultra-processed foods, chemical additives, pharmaceuticals, and social media platforms that promote inactivity and a plethora of cyber-bullying and related peer traumatization, it will have to be up to the states to initiate the necessary guidelines to protect our children.
Policies imposed in Republican states are not only not pro-family, but sow doubt and fear among already marginalized mothers and materially contribute to top-heavy maternal and infant mortality in their jurisdictions.
Not only on the food fight front but also on a host of other issues on which the lords of HHS and 1600 Pennsylvania have taken very questionable stands with regard to childhood health.
Kennedy’s vocal criticism of vaccines as unsafe and ineffective, flying in the face of decades of detailed research.
Trump falsely linking vaccines and acetaminophen to autism was, as bioethicist Arthur Caplan remarked: “the saddest display of a lack of evidence, rumors, recycled old myths, lousy advice, outright lies, and dangerous recommendations by anyone in authority in the world claiming to know anything about science that I have ever witnessed. Among other things, I watched Trump gurgle on about taking bleach during Covid.”
Acetaminophen is actually the safest fever-reducing option for women in their first trimester, reducing risks for miscarriage, birth defects and premature birth, while other OTC medications such as aspirin and ibuprofen pose well-proven dangers to fetus development.
On yet another front, Trump’s support for coal mining clearly does not extend to the miners’ health. Nor does it address the fact that workers in any toxic environment end up tracking pollutants home, on their clothes, boots, and bodies, contaminating their wives and families.
And that the administration’s gutting of the US Agency for International Development, according to the medical journal The Lancet, may mean 14 million more deaths globally by 2030. Fourteen million. Almost twice the population of New York City. A third of them under the age of five.
Going back to the quintuple danger of poor diet, chemical exposure, lack of physical activity, chronic stress, and over-medication, all are the results of conscious choices.
People at all levels of government and community organizations need to take a long, hard look at the structure of an American society that encourages such behaviors that cause so much disease and death. And how much of that is due to growing income inequality.
Too often the government, big business, and other institutions that make or promote decisions which profoundly affect people’s health are, consciously or not, affected by the viewpoints of those skilled on manipulating the system and the interests of the affluent. It is rare for people of color living in ghettos to have much of an input on who lives and who dies, who prospers and who is swept down the drain.
Then there is the I-Am-the God-of-All-I-Survey Buddha in the White House whose promoting of hydroxychloroquine in the spring of 2020 has been linked to approximately 17,000 deaths.
His current medical pontifications contradict most medical experts by:
- insisting that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, used safely for decades now be split into three. Which will require creating separate vaccines from scratch and obtaining FDA approval for each since this is required in no other country
- stopping thimerosal as a vaccine preservative: despite Kennedy’s conspiracy-theorist claims, there is no proven link to autism
- unquestionably supporting Kennedy’s baseless and disturbing claim that studies show children who are circumcised have double the rate of autism, also because they’re given Tylenol
- removing aluminum salts which are needed to activate vaccines for polio, whooping cough and other diseases, rendering them ineffective
In all cases, this will make childhood vaccinations more complicated and more expensive, and it is highly likely a significant number of children will miss out on as many as half of the shots required for their (and their classmates’) future health.
The MACHA men are presiding over a modern-day massacre of the innocents: dismantling key programs to prevent childhood diseases and eviscerating health services designed to help low-income expectant mothers to manage risks and the complications of pregnancy.
All the while pushing draconian regulations against abortion and science-based sex education.
Kennedy’s and Trump’s evisceration of public health systems sadly is NOT about efficiency, cost-saving, or even ideology. It’s about building a world without truth or the possibility of accountability.
The MACHA men are not just weakening essential government systems and undercutting public health; dismantling the conditions of reality itself.
The Fraudster in the White House has decades of experience in cooking the books, inflating assets, employing now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t accounting and clearly sees no harm in doing the same running the country.
Both Kennedy and Trump specialize in manipulating the metrics to support their political stance. As Eric Reinhart wrote in The Nation this week, “every statistic, including mortality rates, overdose deaths, unemployment and homelessness figures, reflects political choices about what, how, and whom to count” and that in dragging the CDC’s data into question, has removed the moral imperative that used to translate individual suffering into collective responsibility.
Since the cabal in D.C. are collectively acting against the interests of we-the-people, politicians at all other levels need to gird their loins and follow California’s lead focusing on making life-affirming decisions for their residents, instead of marching in lockstep with the MACHA men.
NOTE: Check out the New York Times take on how convenience cookery devolved into some of the greatest health threats of our time.
(Liz Amsden is a former Angeleno now living in Vermont and a regular CityWatch contributor. She writes on issues she’s passionate about, including social justice, government accountability, and community empowerment. Liz brings a sharp, activist voice to her commentary and continues to engage with Los Angeles civic affairs from afar. She can be reached at [email protected].)
