Washington Wednesday: The “MAHA” report

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NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Wednesday, the 4th of June.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast.

Time now for Washington Wednesday.

The Department of Health and Human Services has released its assessment of America’s health, and the report isn’t good. Our food is overprocessed, our minds are overloaded, our bodies are over medicated, and we’re all over-tired.

Here’s HHS Secretary Bobby Kennedy releasing the Make America Healthy Again Report.

KENNEDY: There has never in American history has the Federal government taken a position on public health like this. And because of President Trump’s leadership it’s not just one cabinet secretary, it’s the entire government that’s behind this report.

EICHER: Also behind the report is a question Kennedy has been asking for many years: Is the medical establishment’s approach to healing actually making chronic illness worse?

Here’s Washington Bureau Reporter Leo Briceno.

LEO BRICENO: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went from running for president as a Democrat, to becoming an independent candidate, to dropping out and throwing his support behind Donald Trump. Through all of it, he had one issue he made the center of his messaging.

KENNEDY: By chronic disease what do I mean? I mean obesity, neurological diseases, neurodevelopmental, ADD, ADHD, speaking late, language late, ticks, Tourette syndrome, and autism.

Now as the Secretary of the U.S. Department for Health and Human Services, Kennedy has released the Make America Healthy Again or “MAHA” report, detailing just what he wants to do about chronic illness in his tenure on Trump’s cabinet.

The 70 page document outlines four broad areas of focus: “Ultra processed foods, the cumulative load of chemicals in the environment, the crisis of childhood behavior in the digital age, and the overmedicalization of kids.”

It’s a wide-ranging assessment, with implications for policy from drug authorization to school physical education programs. Even his supporters recognize addressing those issues will likely have to extend beyond his tenure at HHS.

So far, Kennedy’s made internal changes to the agencies, reducing the workforce to pre-COVID numbers and streamlining what he has called "redundancies." Here he is on CBS after becoming HHS secretary.

RFK: We have 100 communication departments. We have 40 procurement departments, we have 40 IT departments. We have nine HR departments and many of them have computer systems that can’t talk to each other.

According to the “Celebrating big wins” section of their website, Kennedy has also cut up to $67 billion dollars from the department by suspending contracts and eliminating COVID-related grants. He’s launched operation “Stork Speed” to better evaluate the safety of children’s food. And most recently, the Food and Drug Administration announced it would remove authorization for two synthetic food colorings—Citrus Red No. 2 and Orange B. They plan to implement that change in the coming months with aims to expand that ban to another six dyes.

HISANO: Changing these dyes or some ingredients is more feasible, I guess to change in today's food.

Ai Hisano is a food business researcher and associate professor at the University of Tokyo in Japan. She says food dyes are one piece of the puzzle of food health, with processed foods posing health concerns that will be more challenging to address with policy changes.

HISANO: This is kind of just the tip of the iceberg in today's modern food industry.

And it’s an iceberg many parents have spent years probing on their own.

LAFFERTY: We didn’t know what was going on the first time it happened.

Christy Lafferty is a health coach and pastor’s wife in Asheville, North Carolina. She has three children that have dealt with chronic illness. One of them used to experience intense migraines.

LAFFERTY: But if he stays away from food dyes and MSG, he does not have any problems.

She says turning to alternative medicine helped her learn about the harms of neurotoxins in processed foods and synthetic dyes.

LAFFERTY: I think the average person who doesn’t have a child like my son doesn't know what they don’t know.

While the MAHA report encourages supporters like Lafferty, it worries some medical professionals evaluating Kennedy’s work so far. Mike Varshavski, more commonly known as “Dr. Mike” runs a YouTube channel where he documents the latest conversations in medicine. He’s a practicing family medicine doctor living in New York City.

He’s not a Kennedy fan.

DR. MIKE: We certainly need to be skeptical of our institutions but healthy scientific skepticism means following data not cherry-picking it. Or making it up.

That’s from a video Dr. Mike posted this past Sunday. Varshavsky pointed out a litany of statistics he believes Kennedy has gotten wrong throughout his career. For example, Varshavsky points out Kennedy has claimed that roughly 50 percent of the Chinese population has diabetes, and that Lyme disease could have been developed as a military weapon.

The MAHA report does not make those same claims, but critics still have concerns. After HHS released the report, news outlets discovered that a handful of citations were linked to non-existent scientific studies. More broadly, Varshavsky says Kennedy’s vision for making America healthy conflicts with slashing research budgets and staff.

DR. MIKE: I just don’t see a plan here. There’s a lot of political speak, PR stunts, promises that we’ll remove certain dyes from kids’ food—as if that’s the problem. No. The issue is the ultra-processed foods. The issue is that obesity is going up. Those are the real problems, because that impacts all parts of our lives.

Varshavsky believes Kennedy sees issues that appear connected and then jumps to conclusions about the evidence.

DR. MIKE: RFK sees two things happen at the same time, he doesn’t even care what the evidence shows, he just says they must be causing one another.

But to Kennedy’s supporters, it’s precisely the willingness to explore the possible alternatives to the established answers that makes him a compelling figure. Here’s Lafferty again.

LAFFERTY: It's mothers like me that have wanted a voice and we’ve felt like we have a voice now.”

Lafferty says she disagreed with the doctor’s official recommendations when it came to yet another one of her son’s health challenges.

LAFFERTY: He’s got type one diabetes. His pancreas is broken. They told us to feed him 150 carbs and cover it with insulin. And I said, well, that’s like that’s like somebody that has a kid with a deadly peanut allergy saying here’s a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and an epi-pen on the side. And it didn’t make sense.

Lafferty suggested feeding her son fewer carbs, but faced pushback.

LAFFERTY: They said it was dangerous. Now it’s a big movement in type 1 diabetes and type 2 diabetes to do a low-carb, high-fat diet. A ketogenic diet.

The change in diet helped significantly.

Lafferty is hopeful that Kennedy’s willingness to challenge conventional norms will clear the way for questions about chronic illness the Health Department and the rest of the government haven’t explored yet.

But she’s concerned that Kennedy’s message will fall on deaf ears with the medical industry and public health sector.

LAFFEERTY: I think sometimes Bobby’s naive. Because he thinks if people just hear the truth, they’ll want to change…he can have all these great ideas, how are you going to make it happen?

Bruce Fogerty—the president of Worthwhile Productions—believes Kennedy won’t be pushed around by the medical establishment…or the White House.

FOGERTY: I don’t have any concern that he won’t to the best of his ability do the right thing, regardless of the consequences. Other people, I’m concerned, you know, everyone else wants to be Trump’s favorite.

Fogerty met Kennedy at a campaign event he helped put together in the Fall of 2023. He still exchanges reg ular text messages with Kennedy and describes his tone as optimistic about the work he’s done so far.

Fogerty hopes that Kennedy is able to dig deeper, and move the needle as far as he can in four years.

FOGERTY: He says he’s working harder than he’s ever worked before. I think he’s up to it. I mean he said he prayed every day, you know, that God would put him in a position where he could, you know, change the healthcare system in this country. And the Lord answered that prayer.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Leo Briceno.

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