Make America healthy again! Robert F. Kennedy Jr, RFK, nephew of former President John F Kennedy and son of Robert F Kennedy, who switched from the Democrats to the Republicans in this year's election, will be tasked by President Donald Trump. He is going to make, perhaps, the world's most unhealthy population healthy again.
I spent the last week before the US elections in one of the crucial states, Georgia. If the statistics that Robert F. Kennedy Jr If the figures are correct, the number of overweight and obese people is over 8 million in the small state of Georgia alone. Unlike in Sweden, where the number of obese people is significantly lower than the number of overweight people, obesity is the predominant condition in the United States.
People are suffering from obesity and all its medical consequences on a staggering scale. In Georgia, it's not hard to understand why people are obese, because it's nearly impossible to find anything to eat, in the many bars and restaurants everywhere, that isn't filled to the brim with fat and sugar. RFK has made it big in Trump's MAGA movement by saying he's going to fight corruption in the US food and drug industries. He's going to clean up the bureaucracy that oversees and decides on rules and approvals for food and drugs.
Just as Donald Trump RFK speaks in slogans. In one of the election tours, organized by the well-known conservative journalist Carl Tucker, Kennedy was a spokesman for Trump. In it, he vividly describes the reality in which he and his 11 siblings grew up. Back then, there were no children with autism, ADHD, Tourette's syndrome, allergies or diabetes. Today, he says, in his hoarse, not-quite-healthy voice, every single school class has children with one or more of these conditions. And the numbers are growing. Kennedy's conclusion is clear. It is the food industry and the pharmaceutical industry that, yes he actually uses the word, poisons, poisons Americans.
RFK is correct in his observations in that many Americans live extremely unhealthy lives, driving everywhere and thus moving very little. Not only is the food very high in calories, but traditional portions are so large that they are actually enough for two or three people. This lifestyle has led to diabetes, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, inflammation and joint problems. This is not managed through lifestyle changes, but primarily through medication. This has led conspiracy theorists to claim that there is a connection. RFK does not say this outright, but he more than implies it.
Decades ago, there were already health and food security researchers in the US who pointed out the problems with both US food production and consumption. I listened myself to the now almost 90-year-old scientist Marion Nestle(no relation to the food company) at a conference over 20 years ago, where she noted that food is too cheap in the US. And that is a contributing factor to obesity and disease. The industry needs to sell its products and then everything becomes big, fat and tasty and hard to resist for consumers. The US has made food cheap through hyper-efficient manufacturing methods - which remove much of the nutrition, deplete the soil and ignore all the natural needs of animals. The restaurant industry flavors and serves food in a way that exposes the average American to more than double the amount of calories needed in a day to maintain a healthy weight.
The question is whether it is corruption and conspiracy that is behind it, or just a rather hard-headed and in many ways functioning capitalism. A limitless supply of food that is cheap and easy to consume and also seductively good. It is precisely this domestic industry - agriculture, fast food restaurants and food production - that Trump, during his many election speeches, says he wants to support and protect. It provides jobs to the very groups that voted for him. So how to reconcile Trump's defense of domestic food production with RFK's denunciation of it is just one of the many contradictory messages in this year's campaign. Making Americans whose life expectancy, between 2019 and 2021, dropped from 80 to 76 years old healthy is a mission that requires more than chant-friendly slogans.
Marie Söderqvist, CEO of EPHI
