America is sick.
According to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., “the CDC says that we are the sickest people on earth. We have the highest chronic disease rate on the planet, and the average American who died from COVID had approximately 3.8 chronic diseases.”
Kennedy recently suspended his campaign and teamed up with President Trump to leave a legacy of restoring health to America. “I left the Democratic party in October because it had departed so dramatically from the core values that I grew up with. It has become the party of war, censorship, corruption, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big AG, and big money.” His most damning accusation was directed towards the mainstream media networks: “You (DNC-allied mainstream media networks) didn’t alone cause the devolution of American democracy, but you could have prevented it.”
The state of America’s sickness
Shockingly, nearly three out of four Americans are now overweight, with 42% of Americans qualifying as obese.
And unbelievably, half of all children in America are overweight or obese. Kennedy further noted that “120 years ago, when somebody was obese, they were sent to the circus. There were case reports about them.”
Our country is suffering from another critical health concern that Kennedy did not mention in his speech: the drastic drop in testosterone for modern men. The average levels of testosterone for American males dropped by 1% every year, according to Dr. Thomas Travison and his colleagues from the New England Research Institutes in Watertown, Massachusetts. In the year 2000, the normal American male had a total testosterone level of 605 ng/dl, and only 20 years later, the average testosterone level had plummeted by 27% to just 450 ng/dl.
The standard 22-year-old man today has a testosterone level roughly equal to that of a 50-year-old man in 2000. Said differently, the average Gen-Z male in the prime of his youth has the testosterone levels of a middle-aged man from the year 2000. That is an unbelievable problem and we are seeing its effects played out across every domain in our society.
These statistics about the state of America’s health are not only shocking, they also have deadly consequences. Kennedy detailed that “(America) had 16% of the COVID deaths even though we only have 4.2% of the world’s population.” The disproportionate amount of covid mortalities in a first world country, let alone the United States of America, is baffling and very few people besides Kennedy are addressing it. Another often ignored health concern raised by Kennedy during his speech was the rise in autism in America’s children.
In the year 2000, the autism rate for children 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,” Kennedy remarked. All types of childhood illnesses, neurodivergence, and chronic diseases are on the rise. Almost 18% of American teens have fatty liver disease. “That’s like one out of every five,” Kennedy stated with abjection. “That disease, when I was a kid, only affected late-stage alcoholics who were elderly.”
The general baseline health of a country’s youth is crucial, but the ability of America to defend its allies and our nation’s democratic ideals is existential. RFK Jr. was correct in his assessment when noting “it is a crisis that 77% of our kids are too disabled to serve in the United States military. 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.”
RFK Jr. lamented how America’s sickness has detrimental economic effects as well, “chronic disease costs more to the economy as a whole, at least 4 trillion dollars, than five times our military budget. Today we spend more on health care than any country on Earth, twice what they pay in Europe. And yet we have the worst health outcomes of any nation in the world. We’re about 79th in health outcomes, behind Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Mongolia and other countries.”
According to Kennedy, there are two main culprits behind America’s growing sickness. The first is ultra-processed foods: 70% of American children’s diet is ultra-processed, which means industrially manufactured in a factory. These foods consist primarily of processed sugar, ultra-processed grains, and seed oils.
Kennedy noted how “laboratory scientists, many of whom formerly worked for the cigarette industry which purchased all the big food companies in the 1970s and ‘80s, deployed thousands of scientists to invent new chemicals to make the food more addictive … Hundreds of these chemicals are now banned in Europe. But they are ubiquitous in American processed foods.”
The second culprit behind America’s bloated levels of sickness is the startlingly large amounts of toxic chemicals in “our food, our medicine, and our environment.” Pesticides, food additives, pharmaceutical drugs and toxic waste permeate every cell of our bodies. Atrazine and glyphosate, the main active ingredients in common weed killers such as Round Up (a product which warns against contact with human skin), are sprayed universally on American agricultural lands.
The United States “exceeds 70 million pounds of atrazine and 300 million pounds of glyphosate every year [for agricultural purposes],” said Nathan Donley, environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity. Kennedy laments that “this assault on our children’s cells and hormones is unrelenting.”
By any standard or metric, America is very, very sick.
Who is to blame for these problems?
The American political landscape has long included conflicts of interest between private groups and public office. But it is nonetheless alarming that “80% of the National Institute of Health grants go to people who have conflicts of interest. Virtually everybody who Joe Biden just appointed to a new panel at the NIH to decide food recommendations, they’re all people who are from the industry, they are all people who are from the processed food companies,” said Kennedy. “They’re deciding what Americans hear is healthy: the recommendations on the food pyramid, what goes to our school lunch programs, what goes to the food stamp programs, they’re all corrupted and conflicted individuals.” If America is to regain its health, something must change.
How do we move forward?
Kennedy is hopeful for America to regain its health, and he has a plan to get our country back on track. “The good news is that we can change all this, and we can change it very, very quickly. America can get healthy again. To do that, we need to do three things: first, we need to root out the corruption in our health agencies. Second, we need to change the incentives in our health care system. And third, we need to inspire Americans to get healthy again.”
First, root out corruption in health agencies
RFK Jr. has a three-pronged plan to get America healthy again. The first prong may potentially consist of pointing out and correcting conflicts of interest between pharmaceutical, agricultural, and business lobbies in the United States government. Highlighting the injustices of big agricultural companies, and potentially bringing criminal charges similar to the lawsuit against the Sackler Family, would be a good starting point.
Second, change incentives in our health care system
The second prong would not stop at simply re-doing the food pyramid. RFK Jr’s uncle, John F. Kennedy, implemented the Presidential Fitness Test in schools across the country in 1962. Re-establishing that program along with an education system that emphasizes the importance of diet, exercise, and good relationships in students would greatly improve health in an overweight and obese young population.
With a leader like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. driving policy change at the federal level, traditional health care could move from its sclerotic, reactive approach to truly proactive medicine. This could be accomplished by reducing the health care system of the insurance stranglehold, re-inspecting the structure of the FDA and its practices, and awarding government grants to medical professionals pioneering the path to proactive health care that meets the demands of the individual patient.
Additionally, in the United States, only 27% of crops like wheat and soy are consumed directly by humans. In contrast, more than 67% of crops—all the soy grown in the Midwest—goes to feeding livestock. Instead of growing crops in America’s heartland like corn, wheat, and soy that are sprayed with over 370 million pounds of atrazine and glyphosate annually, (with almost 70% of the crops going to feeding animals), incentivize local farmers to raise organic cattle. Grass-fed cattle do not feed on grain-based crops and would require much less acreage than current livestock practices, which waste and misuse large swathes of land. This plan would open more land to be used for better protein options, raise leverage for local communities, restore much-needed nutrients to the soil of the American Midwest, and most importantly, make Americans healthier.
Third, we need to inspire Americans to get healthy again
Kennedy is an energetic and motivated leader who wants to make Americans live better lives. “We’re going to bring healthy food back to school lunches. We’re going to stop subsidizing the worst foods with our agricultural subsidies. We’re going to get toxic chemicals out of our food. We’re going to reform the entire food system. And for that, we need new leadership in Washington, because unfortunately, both the Democrats and the Republican parties are in cahoots with the big food producers, Big Pharma and Big AG, which are among the DNC’s major donors.”
Injecting a vision of health and vitality into the American culture would solve many potentially existential problems for our country: a healthier population would reduce the bloated health care costs, increase military capacity amidst the current abysmal recruitment levels, and provide a much-needed biological solution to the growing mental health crisis.
Kennedy said that if he is “given the chance to fix the chronic disease crisis and reform our food production, I promise that within two years we will watch the chronic disease burden lift dramatically. We will make Americans healthy again. Within four years America will be a healthy country.”
Mirroring RFK Jr’s comments about President Trump, I’m choosing to believe Kennedy is the man to do the job to restore America’s health.
John Lucke is a native Minnesotan who writes about issues concerning health and public policy, military affairs, and law.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not represent an official position of Alpha News.
