What Will It Take to Make America Healthy Again?

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Courtesy of Kennedy 2024.

In The Unz Review, Ron Unz discusses the state of American health, Gary Taubes (a favorite of this website), and what can be accomplished by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the secretary of the Health and Human Services department. He writes:

Everyone who has looked into these very serious problems agrees that dietary issues are the main culprit. But the complexities of that factor may be seen if we consider two meals, each totaling around 1,000 calories but otherwise quite different, one of them reasonably healthy and the other extremely unhealthy.

Suppose that an employee at a local health-food shop returned from a long day of knocking on doors for Jill Stein. He sat down at the kitchen dinette of his studio apartment for three servings of fruit yogurt, a pair of small Oats & Honey granola bars from Nature’s Valley, and two tall glasses of delicious all-natural orange juice.

Around the same time, a trucker stopped by a McDonalds on his way home from a Donald Trump rally, and proudly wearing his red MAGA cap ordered a Big Mac or a Quarter Pounder with Cheese along with some fries. Ignoring the soda fountain, he walked to the corner liquor store and bought a Budweiser beer to wash down his greasy fast-food meal, so heavy with animal fat and salt.

The contrast between those two hypothetical meals, one that maintains human health and another that seriously undermines it, played in my mind a few weeks ago after I published an article on nutritional issues, the very first time I’d ever investigated that topic.

Although dietary factors are mostly responsible for our health problems, there are some important aspects to this crisis that are not regularly presented in our media. These greatly surprised me when I discovered them, and I think they would probably surprise many others as well.

Thus, in our hypothetical example it was actually the McDonalds and Budweiser meal of the MAGA trucker that was reasonably healthy, while the dangerous dietary choices made by the Jill Stein supporter placed him at high risk of eventually developing diabetes and considerably shortening his life-span. But I’d suspect that more than 95% of educated Americans might automatically assume the opposite. Such a mistake would be the direct consequence of the last half-century of promotion for extremely damaging nutritional policies, whose total failure has been revealed by our devastating public health trends.

I’d originally studied nutrition for a few weeks during my 10th grade Health class in the 1970s, but I hadn’t found the subject interesting and never paid any attention to it in the decades that followed. I would occasionally read high-profile articles on that subject in my daily newspapers, but I wasn’t too sure how seriously to take their often complex and conflicting claims, so all of those usually faded from my memory soon afterward.

However, earlier this year a prominent medical school professor happened to mention to me that our understanding of that subject had undergone a major upheaval over the last twenty years, and that sufficiently piqued my curiosity that I decided to read some of the relevant books and articles. A few weeks ago I’d published a provocatively-titled essay that summarized the very surprising but persuasive analysis that I’d absorbed.

Since I’d never had any interest in dietary or nutritional issues, I’d casually assumed that was equally true of most of the regular visitors to our website and I doubted that my piece would attract much readership. But as has so often been the case, I was entirely mistaken, and it instead drew a good deal of traffic and more than 600 comments, many of them quite long and detailed and far better informed than I had ever been on that topic.

Most of my newly acquired knowledge had come from the books and long articles of Gary Taubes, a very distinguished science journalist with academic roots in physics who had eventually developed an interest in nutrition. Beginning more than two decades ago, his major cover stories in the New York Times Sunday Magazine had heavily challenged our long-established official dogma on that topic, bringing the work of dissenting researchers and medical doctors to much wider attention. This played a crucial role in launching a major scientific debate on those important public health matters, all of which took place while I remained blissfully ignorant and unaware.

What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?
Gary Taubes • The New York Times Sunday Magazine • July 7, 2002 • 7,800 Words
Among his most surprising claims were that contrary to everything I’d always been told, fatty foods were neither harmful to our health nor caused obesity, but instead the true culprits were the carbohydrates that our medical experts had always encouraged us to eat in their place, with ordinary sugar being especially harmful.

So if Taubes and his many scientific allies were correct, for roughly the last half-century our official nutritional policies had been entirely upside-down and backwards. During all those decades, our government and our media had been urging us to replace relatively harmless high fat foods such as sausage, bacon, and eggs with far more damaging fare, including such supposed health foods as yogurt, granola, and fruit juice.

Read more here.