This week, the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission released its first detailed report into the chronic-disease epidemic among American children. As you’d expect, it makes for uncomfortable reading.
Here, in no particular order, are just a few statistics from the 79-page report, which you can read for yourself here.
Over 40% of America’s 73 million children have at least one chronic health condition, whether that’s asthma, an autoimmune disease, diabetes, obesity or a behavioural disorder like autism or ADHD.
Obesity rates among children have increased 270% since the 1970s. More than one in five children aged six or above is now obese.
One in 31 children has an autism-spectrum disorder.
Childhood cancer has increased 40% since 1975.
A quarter of all teenage girls had a major depressive episode in 2022.
Suicide is now the second leading cause of death among teenagers.
At the upper end of the age range, 75% of all 17-24 year olds are ineligible for military service, because of obesity, low levels of physical fitness and mental-health problems.
The report makes clear that ill health, both physical and mental, is one of the greatest challenges facing America today, whichever way you choose to slice it.
As that last statistic shows, ill health is even a direct threat to national security, a connection that often isn’t made, but should be—and quite naturally too. To the ancients, of course, it would have been obvious that a sick population dependent on doctors, pharmacists and taxpayer-funded welfare payments to maintain its existence would be one that would struggle to defend itself. The ancient gymnasia were, quite literally, the foundation of Greek democracy, providing the necessary physical basis for citizenship—which is why tyrants would always close them, as Aristotle noted, and restrict association between free men.
Unfortunately, however, our understanding of the relationship between personal conduct and civic virtue has fallen very far since the days of Classical Athens and Rome. The MAHA report, at least, reminds us of just how wrongheaded our thinking and our habits have become.
The study attributes the changes to four major causes. A majority, perhaps as much as 70% of children’s daily calories now come from ultra-processed foods, which are saturated with useless calories and synthetic additives; children are exposed to tens of thousands of chemicals, many of which have no safety data whatsoever; children are more sedentary than ever, averaging as much as nine hours a day in front of a screen; and, last of all, children are medicalised to an unprecedented degree—with prescription drugs and a vaccine schedule that continues to grow with each passing year, with no sign of ever stopping.
The report lays the blame on government and industry for allowing this terrible crisis to develop. This has happened, the report makes clear, through “corporate capture” of government and, in particular, the regulatory bodies that are supposed to remain independent of the industries they regulate. Government programs like SNAP and the National School Lunch Program, which were supposed to get kids eating properly, have instead helped drive greater consumption of ultra-processed foods. Regulations intended to protect consumers, and especially children, have also been subverted. Perhaps most notably, the FDA’s “Generally Recognized as Safe” system has mutated from a system intended to grandfather common food additives through safety testing into a bizarre, scarcely believable parody of a licensing regime where a food manufacturer can create new additives, claim they’re safe and introduce them to the food supply without any external oversight at all. “Generally Recognized as Insane,” I prefer to call it.
The report doesn’t stop at diagnosing the problem. It concludes with ten recommendations, all eminently sensible and many derived from the combined decades of experience of Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the other health experts, like Dr Jay Bhattacharya and Mark Makary, involved in the Commission. These include new long-term nutritional trials to assess the true impact of consuming ultra-processed foods, new systems to monitor the safety of vaccines and medication, investigation of food additives classified as “safe” by the FDA, the creation of a task force to investigate patterns of chronic disease using AI, and investment in new non-animal testing models for drugs and food additives.
All in all, it’s an impressive document that captures the scope of the problem and suggests realistic, effective responses to it.
The question, of course, is whether it really amounts to the sum of its parts.
Even sympathetic individuals, people who have nothing but hope for the future and success of the MAHA movement, have pointed out some worrying omissions.
One striking omission, as lawyer Tom Renz notes, is the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, which Renz I think rightly describes as the most significant medical intervention of recent years. Criminally, these experimental treatments were administered to children as well as adults—to fetuses, even, since pregnant mothers were given them—and so children and then teens and then adults are going to be reckoning with their effects for years and indeed decades to come, maybe even their entire lifetimes.
Barely a week seems to pass without a new study showing some terrible complication or side effect that’s either totally new or was predicted—and censored—during the pandemic itself. One recent study showed COVID-19 vaccination might be responsible for a 33% drop in successful pregnancies among Czech women, which is a seriously alarming figure.
We need high-quality, non-partisan research into the long-term effects of the COVID-19 vaccines, as well as some idea of what can be done to mitigate or even reverse those effects.
If I’m honest, what worries me is this: There’s already clear signs of a climbdown with regard to the regulation of harmful chemicals and pesticides. The report identifies exposure to harmful chemicals as one of the most important drivers of America’s chronic-disease epidemic, and it fingers familiar chemicals like glyphosate, atrazine, PFAS and phthalates in particular. These chemicals are widely studied and subject to multimillion-dollar lawsuits for their harmful effects. Atrazine has already been banned in the European Union.
But what does the Commission’s report recommend? New studies to determine the effects of these chemicals—and that’s it.
What’s more, according to The Wall Street Journal, the White House altered the report to remove references to Monsanto, information about PFAS lobbying and references to particular conflicts of interest in chemical regulation.
And then EPA head Lee Zeldin told reporters the White House does not want a “European, mandate-driven regulatory system that stifles growth.”
If this isn’t a climbdown—well, I don’t want to blackpill at this early stage, but it certainly looks like one. Time will tell.
One thing should be totally clear, though, the ideology of growth at any cost—especially to health—the ideology Zeldin is essentially swearing to protect, is the at the root of why Americans are so unhealthy today.
In public appearances this week, RFK Jr. has done his best to reassure America’s farmers that he wants to work with them, not against them, to make America healthy again. This is fine, and America’s farmers deserve some reassurance, since they work hard for little pay and they do one of the most valuable jobs it’s possible to do: feeding the nation. They also suffer at the hands of corporate interests that work against their own instinctive priorities in pursuit of ever-greater profits.
Even so, at some point, RFK Jr. and the Trump administration really are going to have to rock the boat. The MAHA agenda can’t please everybody. There have to be winners and losers. For decades, it’s the American people who’ve lost out and grown fatter, sicker and more dependent than it was possible to believe they could become. Now it’s time to turn the tables—or so we thought.