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Boston Globe
11 hours ago
- Boston Globe
Draft of major MAHA report calls for more education, less regulation — and offers few policies
While the document, titled 'Make Our Children Healthy Again Strategy,' retreads key MAHA ground like the need to cut artificial food dyes and encourage physical activity, it also offers a more expansive view of where Kennedy plans to steer his agency. Details of the report, which was delivered to the White House on Tuesday but not made public, were first published by The New York Times. They have yet to be authenticated by White House officials. Childhood vaccine schedule reform is on the agenda, though the report offers no details on how Kennedy will change the list of recommended childhood vaccines, if at all. He has for years cast suspicion on vaccines, often citing flawed research, and promoted the idea that early shots are harming children. The report similarly calls for 'addressing vaccine injuries.' Advertisement 'Together, this strategy will translate the work of the MAHA movement to policies that make a transformative and lasting impact for Americans and end the childhood chronic disease crisis,' says a draft document, dated Aug. 11 and published by Politico. Advertisement The strategy notably avoids mention of the 'This report has one overriding implied message: More research needed,' Marion Nestle, a leading nutrition researcher and professor emeritus at New York University, said via email. But, she said, 'we already know the problems. It's way past time to start addressing them.' Perhaps the most forceful regulatory proposals in the report have to do with marketing. One recommends the Health and Human Services Department work with other federal agencies to enforce direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs, including among social media influencers and telehealth companies. The move falls short of the full ban Kennedy previously talked about. A separate recommendation would create new industry guidelines to 'limit the direct marketing of certain unhealthy foods to children,' though it seems those rules would still be voluntary. (Some of the largest food and beverage companies currently self-regulate under a 'Though still light on specifics, these draft recommendations are a bit of a mixed bag,' said Andrew Binovi, director of government affairs for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. Advertisement Among the ideas is Nestle says the first Trump administration tried to implement a similar plan with pre-packed food boxes distributed through food banks and other organizations, which was 'a disaster for small farmers initially recruited to do these labor intensive and perishable boxes. It makes much more sense to make sure people have enough money to buy food.' Trump's recent tax cut bill The report also suggests the government should incentivize more breastfeeding, either through the WIC program or other routes. There is little mention of ultra-processed foods, or UPFs, which are expected to be a focus of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, due later this year. HHS is also crafting a definition of what constitutes a UPF.'It appears that big food lobbyists have been busy and successful,' said Jerold Mande, CEO of the nutrition nonprofit Nourish Science, who previously held senior policymaking roles at the FDA and USDA under the George H.W. Bush, Clinton, and Obama administrations. 'Who expected the MAHA report to do more to get whole milk in schools than to get UPF out?'The report also says that the USDA will 'prioritize precision nutrition research,' a line of research that aims to provide people with more personalized recommendations by taking into account their body's individual needs and responses to certain foods. Former NIH nutrition researcher Kevin Hall Advertisement The draft report is 'the most ambitious federal plan yet to confront childhood chronic disease,' said Marty Irby, president and CEO at Capitol South and Competitive Markets Action, who previously lobbied for ranchers and farmers. 'Still, there are gaps: the USDA school lunch program continues to force dairy on many children — particularly kids of color — who are lactose intolerant, with little to no alternatives, and the plan offers little to promote local, farm-to-table food in schools.' Aviva Musicus, science director for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, criticized the report as embodying 'the idiosyncratic beliefs' of one person, Kennedy. 'He might be right about food dyes, but the report's recommendations to alter our vaccine framework, restructure government agencies, and promote meat and whole milk are going to promote disease, not health,' Musicus said. While the draft report is not a budget document, it is unclear how much funding would be needed for the various efforts or where it would come from. Already, Congress Advertisement Many of the proposals involve Medicaid, WIC, Instead of regulation, the administration plans to run public awareness and education campaigns aimed at adolescents about physical fitness, screen time, substance use, vaping and 'root cause issues that impact adult infertility.' Another initiative aims to train school and library workers on how to handle overdoses, and expand their access to the overdose-reversal medication Narcan, per the report. States will be encouraged to re-adopt the Presidential Fitness Test, which grades students on their ability to do things such as complete a mile run. HHS will also establish an 'infertility training center,' though the report offers limited details on precisely what services would be offered at such a facility. (Kennedy allies have been pushing for widespread use of what's called Medical schools, which have already been pushed by the administration to Advertisement Elsewhere in the department, National Institutes of Health officials plan to launch two new offices, one focused on developing alternatives to animal testing, such as organ-on-a-chip technologies, and another to organize chronic disease research. NIH will also start a new task force on children's health, and create a database of researchers' funding sources, similar to the OpenPayments system run by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, per the draft report. The commission's recommendations, while largely centered at Kennedy's HHS, also affect the USDA and the Environmental Protection Agency — though not as severely as some in the food and agriculture industries feared. Unlike While calling for more 'innovative growing solutions,' the report also says the government ought to 'ensure that the public has awareness and confidence in EPA's robust pesticide review procedures.' When it comes to air quality — a 'The commission has a historic opportunity to protect America's kids, but only if it resists corporate influence and turns bold ideas into real, accountable action,' Irby told STAT. Here are other highlights from the document: Mental health: More prior authorization Pediatric mental health remains a key focus for Kennedy and his MAHA allies. In February, a White House executive order called mood stabilizers and antipsychotic drugs a ' The draft echoes this language, highlighting the overmedicalization of children as a key challenge to overcome and calling for HHS to form a working group that will evaluate prescription patterns for SSRIs, antipsychotics, stimulants, and other drugs that children take. They also ask the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to work with states to increase prior authorization requirements and tighten prescribing safeguards particularly for ADHD. The draft says the Veterans Administration will provide NIH with de-identifiable data on ADHD, diabetes, and pharmaceutical usage among spouses, dependents and survivors of veterans under 18. It's true that kids can be overmedicalized, said Jennifer Mathis, deputy director for the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law. But it was 'disheartening, however, that the leaked draft strategy makes no mention of well-established services that are critical for children with significant mental health needs, such as intensive care coordination, intensive behavior support, and mobile crisis services,' Mathis said. Rates of anxiety, depression and ADHD in the U.S. are increasing, but the scientific explanation for their rise is Although the scientific literature on screen use offers Notably absent from the report, however, was the startling rise of youth suicide over the last two decades. Suicide is one of the leading causes of deaths in this demographic and is particularly pronounced among Black teenagers. One in five high school students Fluoride: New scrutiny of water standards In discussing the importance of water quality, the document focuses on one element: fluoride. The document does not directly name other contaminants, like PFAS or lead. The report states that the CDC and USDA will 'educate Americans on the appropriate levels of fluoride, clarify the role of EPA in drinking water standards for fluoride under the Safe Drinking Water Act, and increase awareness of the ability to obtain fluoride topically through toothpaste,' Experts largely agree that fluoridation at the level currently recommended by the CDC is safe, despite some growing concern that higher levels of fluoride intake could be The draft of the report also states the FDA will evaluate liquid drops and tablets. This process has already begun, with a Electromagnetic radiation: Studies ahead The report also says HHS plans to study electromagnetic radiation and health research 'to identify gaps in knowledge, including on new technologies to ensure safety and efficacy.' The report doesn't explain what sources of electromagnetic radiation its authors consider possible cause for concern. But Kennedy has claimed — contrary to scientific consensus — on The But while there's not evidence of a link between cell phones and cancer, it's true that the devices have changed dramatically since the advent of smartphones and that kids' usage has skyrocketed, said Emanuela Taioli, director of the Institute for Translational Epidemiology at Mount Sinai's Icahn School of Medicine, via email. 'Perhaps a new study on kids specifically is worth doing.' Daniel Payne and Chelsea Cirruzzo contributed reporting. If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: Call or text 988 or chat . For TTY users: Use your preferred relay service or dial 711 then 988.
CNN
20 hours ago
- CNN
Why teens are so stressed, according to an expert
Mental health Children's healthFacebookTweetLink Follow If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, help is available. Dial or text 988 or visit for free and confidential support. As teens head back to school this fall, many parents are worried about their mental health. And for good reason: Teens today — especially girls — are much more likely to say that they feel persistently sad or hopeless and think about suicide than they did a decade ago. Forty percent of high school students reported experiencing persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness in 2023, according to the Youth Risk Behavior Survey by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That figure was down from a high of 42% two years earlier, during the Covid-19 pandemic, but is about 10 percentage points higher than a decade earlier. The journalist Matt Richtel sheds light on the teen mental health crisis and what can be done about it in his new book, 'How We Grow Up: Understanding Adolescence.' Richtel, a Boulder, Colorado-based science reporter for The New York Times, spent four years researching adolescents for the book. In our conversation, Richtel offered important insight into why teens are so stressed and what we can do about it. This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. CNN: What explains today's teen mental health crisis? Matt Richtel: Adolescent mental health is best understood by understanding what adolescents are going through, and there is new science that helps explain it. They have a highly sensitized brain in a period of time when the world is moving very quickly, and they are receiving a ton of information. Sometimes what they experience is a kind of information overload that looks like intense rumination, anxiety and other mental health distress. CNN: Does a lot of that information overload come from social media? Richtel: Sort of. There is a misconception that the phone is the singular or overwhelming source of the problem. In fact, the science is more complicated. In the 1980s, adolescents faced immense challenges with binge drinking, drunk driving, early experimentation with sex, injury and death. Those risks have fallen sharply. What's important about that context is that it tells us there is a larger issue going on during this pivotal life period and that merely taking the phones away will not solve it. There is reason to limit access to phones because screen time displaces sleep, exercise and in-person interactions. At the same time, the challenges adolescents face come from a larger phenomenon. CNN: What is the larger phenomenon to explain why adolescence is such a tough time? Richtel: Adolescence is a process with a very important purpose: the integration of the known and unknown in a fast-changing world. The known is what your parents tell you is true, like you should read books. The unknown is what actually works as this world is changing. For instance, maybe books aren't the thing anymore. This integration of known and unknown creates an enormous sense of internal conflict for an adolescent. My parents, who love me and feed me, told me one thing, but I am discovering something else. This is happening against the backdrop of the falling age of puberty. As puberty happens earlier, it sensitizes the adolescent brain earlier in life to all this information at a time when the rest of their brain isn't particularly equipped to deal with it. This creates a kind of neurological mismatch between what an adolescent can take in and what they can process. CNN: Does this also help explain why teens often don't listen to their parents? Richtel: Yes. They don't listen to their parents because they're making a transition from being cared for by their parents to needing to learn to care for themselves and their offspring. Some of the research about how teens stop listening to their parents and start listening to strangers is almost funny. Sometimes when your kids look at you with that blank face, you're not looking at a jerk but at evolutionary biology. I would say to parents, please don't take this stuff personally. You can say to your kid, 'Hey, please stop! You sound like a jerk. I don't like that.' But that's very different from taking it personally. CNN: You call this generation of teens 'Generation Rumination.' Why? Richtel: Adolescents are programmed to explore the world around them. In the old days, that exploration happened outside. 'I'm going to forge this river. I'm going to climb this mountain. I'm going to jump off this roof.' Particularly since the 1960s, but even more so now, a lot of exploration happens on the inward side. When it happened on the outside, there were a lot of broken bones. In the last few decades, we've seen more people with mental health questions. Questions have emerged in the past 20 years that no one bothered to talk about previously. Like what is a boy and what is a girl? As uncomfortable as it is for people, it's part of the survival mechanism of the human species, to have adolescents explore for themselves and for others. CNN: You say that many teens don't know why they feel awful when they have loving families and all their physical needs are met. Why? Richtel: Here's an example of what it's like to feel like an adolescent. Let's say, as a parent, you get in a fight with your spouse the same day that your boss leaves. Then you get a bad night of sleep, and the next day you're driving down the road and you look over and see a driver who gives you a look. You experience road rage. It's not all about that driver. And maybe that driver was actually smiling. It's about the combination of factors that have led you to feel really intensely. We feel like that occasionally as parents. Adolescents feel like that all the time. So, when they say they don't understand why they feel that way, I think we can empathize, or at least sympathize as parents, that when you're highly sensitized to your environment with a bit less sleep and a lot of moving parts, it's overwhelming. CNN: Some people think the reason more teens have mental health problems today is because we diagnose and talk about them more than in the past. Or do more teens actually have mental health problems now? Richtel: I think both things are true. There are more teens with mental health challenges, and we are scrutinizing it greatly. CNN: You say that social media affects different kids very differently. Why is this? Richtel: Some kids, interestingly, are actually in a better mood after using social media. Some kids are in a worse mood. It really depends on your genetic predisposition and how much you use it. If you use it all the time, you're displacing things we know to be really healthy (like sleep, exercise and in-person interactions). That's really important. But using it in the moment can affect different kids differently. Some kids wind up happier. If you're lonely and you want to connect with somebody, that's different than if you're predisposed to compare yourself with somebody else and every time you see the ostensibly healthy, wealthy, beautiful person online, you say, 'I am terrible by comparison.' Or you see the fit person online and say, 'I need to stop eating.' But not everybody has that predisposition. CNN: As kids head back to school, what advice do you have for parents when their teens get overwhelmed? Richtel: We need to teach our kids coping skills. Some of what they need is to let the emotion out, not to try to have a rational conversation. If your kiddo says, 'Everyone in the ninth grade hates me,' that's not so rational. It's probably a product of a whole bunch of things, such as sleeplessness, a bad experience or trying to deal with a lot of information. The coping skills we're talking about here include things like putting your face in the snow, taking a cold shower or exercise, all of which allow your neurotransmitters and neurochemicals to settle down. If you can afford it, cognitive behavioral therapy and dialectical behavioral therapy are tools that let people understand that these sensations they're having in their bodies can be addressed and let go of, so that the next day you can have the question, 'Does everyone in ninth grade really hate me? Oh, yeah, Doug likes me, I forgot. So does Sarah. It's going to be OK.' But, in the moment, if you try to have that conversation with your kid, you're adding more information to a brain that's already paralyzed. An overwhelmed kid is like a computer with a blue screen. When we're adding more information, it's like hitting the enter key over and over again. It's not going to do anything. Let them emote without trying to talk reason. It's hard for them to be rational in the midst of overload, so wait until they're ready to listen to you. Parents really are the biggest influencers in their kids' lives. Kara Alaimo is an associate professor of communication at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Her book 'Over the Influence: Why Social Media Is Toxic for Women and Girls — And How We Can Take It Back' was published in 2024 by Alcove Press.
Chicago Tribune
2 days ago
- Chicago Tribune
Editorial: Organ donors should be dead first
Many Americans are dying while waiting for a new heart, lung or liver. In all three cases, demand exceeds supply. It's hard to imagine the desperation of living with a ticking clock and not knowing whether your number will get pulled for a transplant. We recognize the anguish of the families living this horrible reality. But the quest to solve this problem may create perverse incentives. Several days after a drug overdose, Kentuckian TJ Hoover was declared brain dead. Doctors prepared him for organ removal surgery, and as the procedure was about to begin, Hoover woke up. Reports indicate that hospital professionals allegedly disregarded signs that Hoover was still alert, and opted to move forward with harvesting anyway until it was undeniable that their patient was not dead. As outlying as it may be, this 2021 incident is the stuff of nightmares. Such stories are among the main reasons people hesitate to sign consent forms at the DMV. Still, the problem of organ shortages persists for people with organ failure. There are some who are advocating a radical notion to solve the organ shortage: Broadening our definition of 'death.' That's the crux of a recent commentary that appeared in The New York Times, authored by Dr. Sandeep Jauhar, a cardiologist, and Snehal Patel and Deane Smith, directors of the Center for Heart Failure, Transplant and Mechanical Circulatory Support. In some corners of the internet, this commentary is being shared with curiosity; in others, with revulsion. The authors are thoughtful experts, and they back up their thesis with compelling statistics, noting that 'an estimated 15 people die in this country every day waiting for a transplant,' which means we need to find more healthy donor organs. But what they propose next crosses over into unsettling territory. They suggest that our definition of death should also include irreversibly comatose patients on life support. Even if a machine could restore the beating of their heart. 'The brain functions that matter most to life are those such as consciousness, memory, intention and desire,' they write. 'Once those higher brain functions are irreversibly gone, is it not fair to say that a person (as opposed to a body) has ceased to exist?' Although none of this is a laughing matter, we can't help but be reminded of 'The Princess Bride's' Wesley, who after barbaric torture is left 'mostly dead,' a term that just as easily could be applied to 'irreversibly comatose patients on life support.' And, remember, Wesley is revived before the end of that film. In all seriousness, we can appreciate the authors' position and their genuine real-life concern for those waiting on lifesaving organs. But as Hoover's story proves, miraculous recoveries, while rare, can occur even when a person has been on life support for days. Health Resources and Services Administration reviews found more cases where donation protocols may not have been appropriate — 28 of which may have involved patients not legally dead at the time procurement began. If the goal is to keep as many people alive as possible, we should first exhaust all other avenues of scientific advancement and preventive treatment before redefining what it means to be alive. This editorial board likes exploring new ideas. That said, some suggestions are so wrong that they need to be extinguished before they get off the ground. This is one of them. We stand with the living.
