In a piece recently published by The Wall Street Journal, RFK Jr. laid out some key policies that could make America healthier.
From The Wall Street Journal. In my speech endorsing Donald Trump, I said we need to love our kids more than we hate each other. That means coming together to address common problems, and few are more urgent than the chronic-disease crisis. Americans are becoming sicker, beset by illnesses that our medical system isn’t addressing effectively. These trends harm us, our economy and our global standing.
Among American teens, close to 30% are prediabetic. More than 18% of young adults have nonalchoholic fatty liver disease. More than 40% of adults 22 to 44 are obese, according to a 2023 study. In 2020, 77% of young adults didn’t qualify for the military based on their health scores, forcing the military to lower its standards. …
Mr. Trump has made reforming broken institutions a cornerstone of his political life. He has become the voice of countless Americans who have been let down by our elites. He could unite the country by making it his priority to make America healthy again. Here are some specific policy ideas: …
• Prohibit members of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee from making money from food or drug companies. Ninety-five percent of the members of a USDA panel charged with most recently updating nutrition guidelines had conflicts of interest. …
• Level the playing field for Americans internationally on drug costs. Today in Germany, Ozempic costs less than a tenth of what it does in the U.S. because while Berlin negotiates prices on behalf of all Germans, Washington can’t do the same. Legislators should cap drug prices so that companies can’t charge Americans substantially more than Europeans pay.
• Stop allowing beneficiaries of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to use their food stamps to buy soda or processed foods. Nine percent of all SNAP funding goes to sweetened drinks, according to 2011 data. It’s nonsensical for U.S. taxpayers to spend tens of billions of dollars subsidizing junk that harms the health of low-income Americans.
• Revisit pesticide and other chemical-use standards. As of 2019, the U.S. allowed 72 pesticides that the European Union bans. We also allow chemicals in food and skin care that the bloc doesn’t. Some of these chemicals are quite common to our daily lives. …
• Require nutrition classes and functional medicine in federally funded medical schools. Today, 7 out of 10 of the leading killers of Americans are chronic diseases that are preventable, sometimes through improved eating habits. Yet about 80% of medical schools don’t require a course in nutrition. …
What do you think of RFK Jr.’s suggestions? Share your thoughts and prayers below.
(Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal. Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America – Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=143035678)