RFK Jr. Endorsement Marks Turning Point In Fight Against Chronic Disease
Americans are getting sicker and poorer under the weight of chronic food addictions at the heart of our health care crises.
Environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy dropped out of the presidential race Friday and focused his remarks on the epidemic of chronic disease plaguing modern America hooked on hyper-processed food.
“We spend more on health care than any country on Earth,” Kennedy said, “and we have the worst health outcomes of any nation… Nobody has a chronic disease burden like we have.”
In the 1960s, when Kennedy’s uncle was president and his father the U.S. attorney general, American health spending was just 5 percent of gross domestic product. By 2021, it was more than 18 percent of GDP. Obesity rates have also tripled since the early 1960s ushered in the industrialization of the food supply and the low-fat diet craze. In other words, Americans are getting sicker and poorer under the weight of chronic food addictions at the heart of our health care crises.
Kennedy’s endorsement of former President Donald Trump on the heels of the DNC “sugar high” marked another turning point in the race. But Kennedy’s endorsement speech might have also marked a turning point in the crusade against chronic disease by rejuvenating an American appetite for genuine prosperity, one where thriving means to opt outside with our neighbors than to drown ourselves in the cheap dopamine of take-home eating.
Kennedy ended his bipartisan campaign by outlining more of the numbers. It’s well worth a read:
We have the highest chronic disease rate on earth, and the average American who died from COVID had on average 3.8 chronic diseases. So these were people who had immune system collapse, who had mitochondrial dysfunction. And no other country has anything like this. Two-thirds of American adults and children suffer from chronic health issues. Fifty years ago that number was less than 1%. So we’ve gone from 1% to 66%. In America, 74% of Americans are now overweight or obese, including 50% of our children. One-hundred and twenty years ago, when somebody was obese, they were sent to the circus. There were case reports about them. Obesity is almost unknown. In Japan, the childhood obesity rate is 3% compared to our 50%.
Here, half of Americans have prediabetes or type two diabetes. When my uncle was president, when I was a boy, juvenile diabetes was effectively nonexistent. A typical pediatrician would see one case of diabetes during his entire 40 or 50-year career. Today, one out of every three kids who walks to his office is diabetic or prediabetic, and the mitochondrial disorder that causes diabetes is also causing Alzheimer’s, which is now classified as diabetes. And it’s costing this country more than our military budget every year. There’s been an explosion of neurological illnesses that I never saw as a kid. ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, Tourette’s syndrome, narcolepsy, ASD, Asperger’s, autism. In the year 2000, the autism rate was 1 in 1,500. Now autism rates in kids are 1 in 36, according to the CDC. Nobody’s talking about how 1 in every 22 kids in California has autism, and this is a crisis that 77% of our kids are too disabled to serve in the United States military.
What is happening to our country, and why isn’t this in the headlines every single day? There’s nobody else in the world that is experiencing it. This is only happening in America. And by the way, there has been no change in diagnosis, which the industry sometimes likes to say to say there has been no change in screening. This is a change in incidence. In my generation, seventy-year-old men, the odds and rate are about 1 in 10,000. And in my kids generation, 1 in 34… I repeat, in California, 1 in 22. Why are we letting this happen? Why are we allowing this to happen to our children? These are the most precious assets that we have in this country. How can we let this happen to them?
About 18% of American teens have fatty liver disease. That’s like one out of every five. That disease, when I was a kid, only affected late-stage alcoholics who were elderly. Cancer rates are skyrocketing in the young and the old. Young adult cancers are up 79%, and one in four American women is on antidepressant medication, 40% of teens have a mental health diagnosis, 15% of high schoolers are on Adderall, and half a million children are on SSRIs.
The third-party spoiler candidate had been polling around 5 percent in RealClearPolitics’ aggregate of surveys while Vice President Kamala Harris led Trump by 2. Now Kennedy is gunning for a cabinet position where he can implement his health agenda, who appears to have found a more likely ally in President Trump and a potential President Harris, which was probably obvious by anyone who had been watching.
After disparaging censorship and the “forever wars” of Washington D.C., issues which Trump had always been on the same page, Kennedy brought chronic disease back to the spotlight in the presidential contest. Hopefully Trump’s next grocery store press conference will feature tables full of produce over boxes of Cheerios when the Republican candidate complains about inflation. The problem isn’t just that food prices are too high, but that the quality is too low.
Links:
The Federalist: RFK Jr. Trashes Estrogenic Seed Oils In Trump Endorsement Speech
The Federalist: Dana Bash Admits Democrats Are The Party Of Low-T Beta Males
The Rabbit Hole: Young Men Leave Democratic Party
The Conversation: Mental menu: Your food choices may be causing anxiety and depression
New York Post: Cigarette smoking plummets to all-time low: Just 11% of US adults say they’ve lit up recently
Photos:
<a href=“Marcus Aurelius | The head of Marcus Aurelius found in the P… | Flickr“>Bradley Weber / Flickr </a> / <a href=“https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/“>CC BY 2.0</a>
[YouTube / The Independent]<a href=“Colorado Morning Afterglow (Explored May 2022) | WEBSITE Flu… | Flickr“>G. Lamar/ Flickr </a> / <a href=“https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/“>CC BY 2.0</a>