RFK Jr.'s New Report Actually Nails What's Wrong With American Health. Too Bad About the Other Part.

Yahoo

a day ago

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Emma lives in France. She wakes up in a country where junk food advertising to children is controlled. At school, she eats a nutritious lunch—half of which must come from locally sourced ingredients. The chemicals in her food are more strictly monitored; France bans many food additives that are still allowed in American products. When she gets home, she's not bombarded by algorithm-driven social media designed to maximize engagement through addictive content.
Madison lives in Ohio. She wakes up to a breakfast, marketed directly to her through cartoon characters, packed with sugar and artificial additives. At school, she can buy snacks from a vending machine—something banned in French schools—stocked with products from companies that spend millions targeting her developing psychology. Her toys and environment contain harmful chemicals like PFAS and bisphenols that remain largely unregulated in America, unlike in France. After school, she's on social media platforms that use sophisticated algorithms to keep her scrolling, often on to content that makes her feel worse about herself.
The health outcomes speak for themselves: France ranks third globally in child well-being, while the U.S. ranks 36th. The difference between Emma and Madison isn't that French doctors practice medicine differently. It's that the French government governs differently.
As a pediatrician, I see this policy gap play out in my practice every day. The food we eat and the environment we live in are the primary drivers of chronic disease. Poor nutrition from ultra-processed foods drives obesity and diabetes, environmental toxins contribute to asthma and developmental disorders, and social media algorithms fuel mental health issues. I spend most of my time recommending lifestyle changes that work beautifully in countries like France but struggle to take hold in America's toxic environment.
So when I opened the Trump administration's new 'Make America Healthy Again' report on childhood chronic disease, I was genuinely intrigued. Finally, I thought, a government document that seemed to understand what I see daily in clinical practice.
The statistics cited are sobering. Over 40 percent of American children now have at least one chronic disease, with childhood obesity increasing by more than 270 percent since the 1970s. As a pediatrician treating these conditions, I was impressed by how thoroughly the commission had documented the crisis.
But as I continued reading, I kept waiting for the group to outline a solution. Nearly 70 percent of children's calories come from ultra-processed foods designed to override satiety mechanisms and increase caloric intake, and kids are exposed to 15 food ads a day, with over 90 percent promoting products high in fat, sugar, and sodium. Not to mention the pesticides and microplastics commonly found in at alarming levels in their blood and urine. Americans, as the report demonstrates, simply live in an environment that is saturated with foods and chemicals that are terrible for our health.
Just trying to avoid all this stuff can be impossible, particularly if you are a child. The logical thing to do to 'make America healthy' might be to regulate the industries that profit from making us sick—restricting predatory food marketing, cleaning up our chemical environment, and ensuring that kids have access to nutritious options.
But MAHA doesn't suggest doing that. Instead, I found something far more fascinating: a document that makes the most compelling progressive case for government intervention I've ever seen, while at the same time steadfastly refusing to embrace its own conclusions.
The MAHA report reads as if it were ghostwritten by a liberal think tank. It meticulously details what it calls 'corporate capture'—the way industry interests dominate and distort government actions, regulatory agencies, and medical institutions. The commission even provides a blueprint for solutions, citing countries with superior pediatric health outcomes. It notes that France bans junk food advertising to kids. Japan mandates comprehensive school nutrition programs.
Regulation is possible and desirable. It's a lever that government could pull so that citizens lead healthier lives. The MAHA Commission has accidentally written a landmark conservative admission that the free market doesn't work in health care—that allowing corporations to operate without regulation corrupts institutions and undermines children's well-being.
Stunningly, rather than embrace the obvious solution its data demand, the report pivots to blaming 'the overmedicalization of our kids.' That is, it claims that doctors like me and our health care system at large are too focused on treating illness and not on preventing it in the first place. It calls for 'unleashing private sector innovation' while explicitly rejecting 'a European regulatory system'—the kind that bans harmful food additives and restricts corporate marketing directed at children.
This is where the commission's logic completely breaks down. It has spent dozens of pages documenting how corporate greed harms children, from selling them ultra-processed foods to exposing them to chemical toxins, creating an environment that leads to obesity, asthma, and other chronic illnesses. Then the group proposes solving this issue by giving those same interests more power while scapegoating the doctors trying to treat the resulting diseases of a system that prioritizes profit over well-being.
As someone who treats these children regularly, I can tell you: This 'overmedicalization' narrative is completely backward. One example that the report gives of this phenomenon is asthma, noting that prescriptions for medications to control it went up by 30 percent over the course of a decade and declaring, 'American children are on too much medicine.' But the medicine isn't the problem. When I treat a child with asthma, I am dealing with the social determinants of health. That child gasping for breath in my office needs an inhaler because they live in substandard housing with environmental toxins that the government refuses to regulate.
This is the reality of practicing pediatrics in America: We're forced to medicalize what other countries prevent through policy. Childhood obesity isn't just a medical condition—it's the symptom of a society that refuses to regulate the food industry. Doctors are left treating the symptoms, with the actual disease being the upstream social and economic factors.
I agree with MAHA. This is not ideal. As much as we try, a doctor's stethoscope can't fix what a politician's pen breaks.
The MAHA report's critique of doctors reveals how little the commission, which includes not one pediatrician, understands about practicing medicine. For example, the report notes that antidepressant prescriptions were written for greater than 2 million adolescents in 2022, a statistic that makes it seem as if doctors randomly hand out antidepressants. But this ignores that teenage depression rates have skyrocketed, with 5 million adolescents (20 percent of them) having a major depressive episode.
When I prescribe an antidepressant to a teenager, it's not because I prefer pharmaceutical solutions. It's because I've already recommended therapy and behavioral changes. We spend much of our time advising nutritional improvement, increasing physical activity, and limiting screen time. However, that teenager lives in a country where all of that is constantly undermined by social media and chronic stress—the very societal factors the report identifies.
When it comes to food and mental health, can kids and teens really do anything differently? The typical anti-regulation argument of 'personal responsibility' completely collapses when applied to minors. Children aren't autonomous actors who can meaningfully consent to destructive behaviors. Society has a moral imperative to protect children from predatory behavior. The typical response—that parents should simply 'take more responsibility'—ignores that we're asking families to fight billion-dollar industries alone. That approach has clearly failed.
This is particularly true when it comes to guns. A child cannot be held responsible for gun safety. The report's ideological blinders are perhaps most evident in what it omits entirely: There is no discussion of firearm-related fatalities, the leading cause of pediatric deaths.
The report does make important observations about pharmaceutical-industry capture, noting: '9 out of the last 10 FDA commissioners have gone on to work for the pharmaceutical industry.' This is a real problem, and the solution is shutting the revolving door between industry and government. Instead, the MAHA Commission uses these legitimate concerns to promote distrust of evidence-based medicine entirely— undermining confidence in the childhood vaccination schedule and framing the worsening mental health crisis as doctor-driven overmedicalization.
Despite its flaws, the MAHA commissioners have handed both parties a critical moment of choice.
For conservatives, it's a test of whether they're truly the populist party they claim to be. The commission has made the case for government intervention better than any progressive ever has. The question is whether they'll follow their own logic or remain trapped by free-market orthodoxy that's clearly failing America's children.
For progressives, it's a reckoning: MAHA has accurately diagnosed the problem. It has correctly identified that U.S. institutions—the Food and Drug Administration, which approves medications from companies that later hire its commissioners; the Department of Agriculture, whose dietary guidelines are written by committees with extensive food-industry ties—are failing American families. Democrats, meanwhile, have found themselves defending institutions that are no longer serving their original purpose—regulatory agencies captured by the very industries they're supposed to regulate.
While Republicans have the diagnosis correct, neither side has presented a cure. MAGA's answer is to let DOGE destroy the government's ability to regulate, while establishment Democrats champion the failing status quo. As the popularity of the MAHA movement shows, Americans aren't anti-government; we're anti-corruption. The real answer is pragmatic progressivism—not defending captured institutions but reimagining government—by explicitly channeling antiestablishment anger into pro-government reform.
Without these changes, in another decade a different administration will release the next report documenting the same crisis, but with worse statistics. If that happens, the MAHA report will be remembered not as the document that made America healthy again—it'll be remembered as the moment we chose ideological paralysis over taking back our democracy, despite the cost to our children.