Tuesday, during an appearance on Fox News Channel’s “Jesse Watters Primetime,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. commented on the decline in testosterone levels among young males in America.
Partial transcript as follows:
WATTERS: HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is here.
All right, Secretary, I don’t know if you can see, but I have a little snack food aisle set up next to me here on set. We have Flaming Hot Cheetos, we have Skittles, we have Trix, Froot Loops — the whole thing.
Now, Gutfeld made a point on “The Five” today. He said, when I was growing up, I ate Froot Loops for breakfast every day, and I turned out just fine. Now, I would argue, he turned out like a maniac. He’s hyperactive and deranged. But does he have a point? What are these food dyes actually doing to kids, especially?
KENNEDY: Well, if you look at the ingredients for Froot Fruit Loops 20 years ago, it was very, very different than it is today. And today we use chemicals in Froot Loops that are banned in virtually every country in the world.
So if you buy Froot Loops today in Canada, it is made with vegetable dyes. If you buy it here in the United States, it’s made with petroleum synthetics.
And as I said in that clip, nobody wants to eat petroleum. So when we went to meet with the food companies, I said to my staff, you know, if they want to eat petroleum, they should put it in their food themselves at home. They shouldn’t be feeding it to Americans who without their knowledge, without their consent.
And today, we announced that we’re going to get it out of the food. So there are nine dyes, Jesse, two of them we are going to ban immediately, Orange B and Red Dye 2. We’re going to accelerate the removal of Red Dye 3, so we’re going to bring it down to under a year and the other six dyes within 18 months. We hope to get them out of all the food and that’s just the beginning.
I mean, one of the problems is that the science about these additives has been systematically suppressed for 30 years because the industry has been running this agency. And we’re getting rid of all of those conflicts. We’ve gotten rid of most of them, and we’re going to do real science, and we’re going to do science precisely on the issues that Americans care about, making sure their kids are getting food that isn’t poison.
The food our kids are eating today is not really food. It’s food-like substances, and some of it was made in petroleum refineries, and we need to give our kids real food again.
We’ve got the highest chronic disease burden of any country in the world. When my uncle was President, three percent of Americans had chronic disease. Today, it is 60 percent. Seventy-four percent of our kids cannot qualify for military service.
We have fertility rates that are just spiraling. A teenager today, an American teenager has less testosterone than a 68-year-old man. Sperm counts are down 50 percent. And we are also hitting puberty at six years old.
WATTERS: Wait, wait. An American teenager has less testosterone than a 68- year-old man?
KENNEDY: That’s right. Testosterone levels have dropped 50 percent from historic levels. And, you know, and that is a problem, and it’s an existential problem, but it’s only — that is only when we have obesity that is off the charts.
Again, when my uncle was president, we had about 11 percent of kids who had obesity. Today, 74 percent of Americans are obese or overweight. And you know, in Japan, it’s three percent, so you know — and that’s because they pay attention to what they’re feeding kids in school.
WATTERS: Yes, the Japanese are very skinny, except for the sumo wrestlers. Those people are not so skinny.
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