WASHINGTON – Make America Healthy Again. The movement picked up steam during the 2024 election and has rapidly grown in popularity since. So what is it? And what could it look like in practice?
All over social media, you'll find clips of health experts sounding the alarm on America's health crisis.
"The number one killer today is not smoking, it's not war, it's not infections, it's food," said Dr. Mark Hyman on one of his recent "The Doctor's Farmacy" podcasts.
Hyman and others have been advocating for years about the dangers of the American food supply and the increasingly toxic environment Americans are living in.
"In the last 50 or so years there's been about 10,000 chemicals added to the American food supply, where countries in Europe only have 400 approved for use," Vani Hari, also known as "The Food Babe," told Fox News.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. wants to lead America's war on chronic disease and if he becomes Secretary of Health and Human Services, he will focus on reforming the federal government's health agencies.
Among his advisors are siblings Casey and Calley Means. Casey, a Stanford-educated surgeon, is the author of "Good Energy".
The book is considered to be the health "playbook" for the incoming Trump administration.
"93 percent of American adults have metabolic dysfunction. This is caused by our toxic food system, and our modern lifestyle which has changed rapidly for the past 50 to 75 years," Means told CBN News.
Means believes up to 80 percent of diseases can be avoided by addressing their root causes.
"Our rates of chronic diseases are going up every single year," Means explained. "The more money we're spending on healthcare, the sicker we're getting."
Means says RFK, Jr. has a three-pronged agenda.
First, get conflicts of interest out of health agencies.
Second, produce uncompromised, evidence-based research to establish guidelines for health standards.
And third, reverse the trend of the chronic disease epidemic.
Katy Talento is an epidemiologist by training and served as a health advisor to the first Trump administration. She says RFK, Jr. and his team will likely start with structural reforms.
"So, for instance, the types of advisory committees that are made up of outside experts, both at the CDC and at the FDA, are riddled with big pharma corruption," Talento told CBN News. "There's almost no expert that sits on those panels that is independent of pharma money."
However, legislation can't just be slashed and Talento says certain laws and statutes could be a barrier. She adds the interpretation of those laws though is in the purview of executive branch officials and how much they can do depends on how they navigate the regulatory tools available to them.
"So, for instance, we have all these food additives, you know, red dye number whatever and yellow dye and too many syllables you can pronounce, that is in all our food. Those additives, no one ever approved them as safe," she explained.
"They were given a designation by the FDA of 'Generally Recognized as Safe,' GRAS, and it basically means some scientist somewhere, probably on the food industry payroll, said that this is probably fine. That's basically what happened," Talento continued.
"So that kind of process, that GRAS process, can be dramatically reformed and that designation can be removed quickly from many, many of the poisonous and toxic or even questionable additives that are permitted in our food supply that frankly are not permitted in any other country's food supply," she concluded.
"The Food Babe" sums it up with this memorable example.
"There is a chemical called Red 3 that is banned in lipstick, and it's been banned for a really long time, since 1990, over 30 years, but is still allowed in strawberry milk drinks that we give to kids and cancer patients. This is the problem with our FDA," she told Fox News.
Talento sees it as a "spiritual battle."
"So how much you and I are praying and fasting for these initiatives will help determine how possible it is," she said.
RFK, Jr. will have his Senate confirmation hearing in January where he'll be asked about all of this. Vaccines are sure to come up too. While he says he's not anti-vaccine, he has called for more transparency around them.
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