“We will reverse the chronic disease epidemic,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Donald Trump’s choice for Health and Human Services Secretary, said during his confirmation hearing on Wednesday.
Kennedy said during his opening statement that health care costs are so high in the U.S. because of the chronic disease epidemic.
“The CDC says 90 percent of healthcare spending goes toward managing chronic disease, which hits lower-income Americans the hardest. The president’s pledge is not to make some Americans happy again, healthy again, but to make all of our people healthy again,” he said, noting there is “no single culprit” of chronic disease.
When asked, specifically, why he is passionate about “nutrition-oriented disease prevention,” Kennedy pointed to the stark difference between the prevalence of chronic disease when he was a child and what is occurring in the present day.
“I had 11 brothers and sisters. I had dozens of first cousins. I was raised in a time where we did not have a chronic disease epidemic. When my uncle was president, two percent of American kids had chronic disease. Today, 66 percent have chronic disease,” he said, sharing the shocking statistics.
“We spent zero on chronic disease during the Kennedy administration. Today, we spend $4.3 trillion a year,” he continued, revealing that “77 percent of our kids cannot qualify for military service.”
“When I was a kid, the typical pediatrician would see one case of diabetes in his or her lifetime — a 40- or 50-year career. One out of every three kids who walks through his office door [now] is diabetic or pre-diabetic, and the most recent data from NIH shows 38 percent of teens are diabetic or pre-diabetic,” he said, noting that autism rates “have gone from one in 10,000 to one in 1,500, depending on what studies you look at.”
He added that the United States has witnessed an “explosion of autoimmune disease, of allergic diseases.”
“This is not just an economic issue. It’s not just a national security issue. It is a spiritual issue, and it is a moral issue,” he pressed. “We cannot live up to our role as an exemplary nation, as a moral authority around the world when we’re writing off an entire generation of kids,” he said, promising that, if confirmed, “[W]e will reverse the chronic disease epidemic and put the nation back on the road to good health.”
He provided some examples of how the United States could implement the MAHA agenda, using federal funding of the SNAP program — and school lunch programs — as examples.
“We shouldn’t be giving 60 percent of the kids in school processed food that is making them sick. … We shouldn’t be spending 10 percent of the SNAP program on sugar drinks. We so we have a direct ability to change things,” he said, adding that “we need to focus more on outcome-based medicine, on putting people in charge of their own health care, of making them accountable for their own health care so they understand the relationship between eating and getting sick” with Medicaid and Medicare as well.
“Most importantly, we need to use deploy NIH and FDA to doing the research to understand the relationship between these different food additives and chronic disease, so that Americans understand it and make sure that Americans are aware,” he said, making it clear that he is not looking to ban junk food.
“But I don’t want to take food away from anybody. If you like a cheeseburger, a McDonald’s cheeseburger, diet Coke — which my boss loves — you should be able to get them. If you want to eat Ho Hos, Twinkies, you should be able to do that, but you should know what the impacts are on your family and on your health,” he added.
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