Trump administration promises U.S. health ‘transformation’ as report puts faith in farmers

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The Donald Trump administration is promising the U.S. public a “transformation of our food, health, and scientific systems” in a new report that says novel approaches can extend American lives and bolster the well-being of the country’s population.

But what the U.S. needs most, the report suggests, is more food from the country’s farmers.

The report, released Thursday, was compiled by the “Make America Healthy Again Commission,” established by Mr. Trump in a February executive order. The MAHA Commission’s chair is Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a controversial figure in the administration who has expressed skepticism about vaccines.

The report describes what it deems a crisis in the health of American children, calling them the ”sickest generation in American history in terms of chronic disease.” Four potential culprits are identified in the report: diets laden with ultraprocessed foods; exposure to synthetic chemicals; lifestyles that have grown too stressful, sedentary and addicted to screens; and “overmedicalization” through the prescription of drugs ”often driven by conflicts of interest in medical research, regulation, and practice.”

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The report also argues that other elements of Mr. Trump‘s agenda can be beneficial to health. The commission states that the “Great American Comeback of energy dominance” will power artificial intelligence that will, in turn “develop new tools and push the frontiers of science to help us better understand how to measure and reverse chronic disease.”

Mr. Trump has repeatedly invoked a “drill, baby, drill” mantra as the foundation of his desire for American energy supremacy. But a 2017 study by Frederica Perera, founder of the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health, found that the burning of fossil fuels is “the world’s most significant threat to children’s health and future.”

Prof. Perera said in a brief statement that “there is certainly a contradiction between the Administration’s energy policy and children’s health.”

The report seems to have been written around a series of preconceived hypotheses, said Kate Lorig, a professor emerita of public health at Stanford University School of Medicine.

“It’s just not very good science. And I’m being kind,” she said. While many of the report‘s areas of interest “are probably worth studying and looking at, they’re not worth putting an entire policy agenda on.” It’s not even clear that childhood chronic illness has risen, she added, given the advances in medical science that have allowed better detection and higher rates of survival for conditions that might previously have been fatal.

Nonetheless, the report envisions a coming decade that will bring to the U.S. “a revolution in living standards and prosperity.”

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It catalogues the gloomy statistics of modern American life, with rising rates of depression, severe obesity, diabetes, autism and cancer – even as drug prescription rates rise.

“American children are highly medicated – and it’s not working,” the report states. It points to an often-cited statistic that more than three-quarters of Americans aged 17 to 24 cannot be considered for military service for reasons that are primarily linked to weight, physical shortcomings and mental health problems.

The report makes no mention of the improvements in health care screening that have led to greater diagnosis of some ailments. Nor does it refer to gun violence, which is now the leading cause of death for U.S. children and teens. The use of firearms in assaults and suicides has erased nearly 2.5 years from U.S. life expectancy.

The report instead offers a simple solution: ”The greatest step the United States can take to reverse childhood chronic disease is to put whole foods produced by American farmers and ranchers at the centre of health care.“

To bolster this claim, it points to a 2019 study of 20 adults whose diets were controlled by researchers for four weeks. Participants ate ultraprocessed foods during one half of that time, and unprocessed ones during the other. On the processed diet, those adults gained two pounds of weight. On the whole food diet, they lost two pounds.

The report identifies a series of additives as problematic, including food colourings, titanium dioxide, propylparaben, butylated hydroxytoluene and artificial sweeteners such as aspartame, sucralose and saccharin.

The report itself draws only a tenuous link between those substances – which are commonly used to preserve and pigment foods – and health dangers. Butylated hydroxytoluene, or BHT, for example, “may be associated [with] tumour growth in rodent studies.”

The Canadian government has proposed a finding that BHT is damaging to the environment, but that “is not harmful to human health at current levels of exposure.”

The report lays part of the blame at the feet of the U.S. food industry, pointing to consolidation that has allowed four companies to control 80 per cent of meat sales and a profit structure that delivers just 16 per cent of food spending to farmers.

One problem, it says, is food safety regulation, which has “increased costs and burdensome paperwork that disproportionately impact family-run operations.” It suggests change is needed to nutritional guidelines to steer Americans away from processed foods.

Academic research has not been able to identify whether health issues related to ultraprocessed foods, or UPFs, stem from high consumption of those products or from “the lack of more nutritious fresh foods,” said John Warner, an emeritus professor of pediatrics at Imperial College London, whose work is cited in the report.

But, he said, ”the evidence points to both contributing to the increases in long-term ill health with obesity, cardiovascular diseases, neurodevelopmental and mental health disorders and cancers.”

At the same time, he added, recognition of that problem is unlikely to achieve much if governments do not help people acquire whole foods, which tend to be more expensive.

Without subsidies, “families with restricted finance will continue to go for the very much cheaper UPFs,” he said.

The report, meanwhile, strikes a series of discordant notes. Produced by a Republican-led government determined to strip away government spending, it suggests part of the problem lies with the preponderance of industry in advertising, lobbying and scholarship, which far outstrips public investment in research.

At the same time, it decries the broad use of chemical additives in a country that has taken a light approach to regulating such products, while saying any solution “cannot happen through a European regulatory system that stifles growth.”

Instead, it promises change will come “through a renewed focus on fearless gold-standard science throughout the federal government and through unleashing private sector innovation to understand and reduce the cumulative chemical load on our children.”