The Devil’s in the Details II

Please stop using AI to write stuff, Secretary Kennedy, sir

I’ve used that phrase—the devil’s in the details—for an essay title before, I know. But I can’t think of a better way to put it. If RFK Jr. and the good people on the Make America Healthy Again Commission don’t start paying attention to the small things—well, you know that old chestnut. It’s not going to be pretty.

The background. Last week, the Make America Healthy Again Commission released its first detailed report, outlining its priorities to address the epidemic of chronic-health diseases among America’s youth. The commission’s goal, the report says, is to end this crisis “by getting to the truth of why we are getting sick and spurring pro-growth policies and innovations to reverse these trends.”

First, let’s talk about what’s right with the report.

Put bluntly, in the history of American public health, there hasn’t been a document like this. Nobody else, no other administration, has attempted to grapple with the problem of America’s sickness as holistically or as sincerely as this. The MAHA Commission Report really is groundbreaking.

The report defines the problem in simple, shocking terms—four in ten American children now have at least one chronic health condition like asthma, 75% of 17-24 year olds are ineligible for military service dude to obesity, poor fitness and mental-health issues—provides an account of the major drivers (ultra-processed foods, chemical exposures, sedentary lifestyles, ever-growing medicalization and corporate capture of regulators), and it also offers a suite of recommendations, like commissioning new long-term nutritional studies on the effects of diets heavy in ultra-processed foods and creating new AI systems to investigate patterns in chronic disease. Those recommendations, unlike virtually all public-health policy directed at chronic disease in recent decades, aim at the root causes of chronic disease, rather than offering further ad hoc responses that bolster the power of the industries—Big Pharma and Big Ag—that are so heavily contributing to the problem and preventing it from ever being solved.

So the document isn’t just a diagnosis, it’s a prescription, and those prescriptions are sensible and likely to make a real difference if implemented properly.

Here are some more statistics from the report, just in case you doubt the scale of the problem.

Obesity rates among American children have increased 270% since the 1970s. More than one in five children aged six and above is now obese.

One in 31 children has an autism-spectrum disorder.

Childhood cancer has increased 40% since 1975.

A quarter of all teenage girls had a major depressive episode in 2022.

Now, for what’s wrong with the report. Actually, before I get to the wrong, a caveat. All my criticisms should be taken in the spirit in which they are intended. I want MAHA, I want Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to succeed. That much should be obvious from my more than half a decade of campaigning to educate my Twitter followers and the wider public about the causes of ill health today and how to reverse them. I’ve made the case, time and again, for fundamental changes to the way the food and medical industries work. Indeed, in 2022, I wrote The Eggs Benedict Option, which I was recently told by a senior admirer in the Trump administration might as well be a manifesto for the MAHA movement itself.

I’m not trying to come across as defensive here: I just want you to know, if you didn’t already, that if there’s anybody who wants to see America made healthy again, it’s me. As with so much of what Trump is doing right now, if Kennedy can succeed, his success can serve as a template for reform across the Western world, including in my native Great Britain, where the ordinary man or child on the street is scarcely less unhealthy than their American counterpart.

Okay, now on to the wrong—last week I took Kennedy to task for what appears to be the beginning of a climbdown on regulating harmful chemicals like glyphosate and atrazine. A week later, I still see it and I still don’t like it. But now an equally if not more serious problem with the report has reared its ugly head, one that threatens to overshadow and even derail the whole MAHA project, by sapping its credibility.