WASHINGTON, D.C. – The movement to Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) is alive and well under new Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. From food dyes to baby formula, he and his team are moving at breakneck speed to address America’s chronic disease epidemic.
In February, RFK, Jr. was sworn in as the new Secretary of HHS.
“For 20 years, I’ve gotten up every morning on my knees and prayed that God would put me in a position where I could end the childhood chronic disease epidemic in this country,” Kennedy said following his swearing in.
The same day the HHS leader was installed, President Trump signed an executive order creating the “Make America Healthy Again Commission,” and since then, the movement to improve America’s health has been moving forward rapidly.
“Some of the possible factors we will investigate were formally taboo or insufficiently scrutinized,” Kennedy said in his first address to his department. “The childhood vaccine schedule, electromagnetic radiation, glyphosate, other pesticides, ultra-processed foods.”
Kennedy says nothing is off limits.
His first target: food additives.
In March, Kennedy met with the heads of major food companies, telling them food dyes must be phased out by the end of his term.
Advocates like Vani Hari, also known as “Food Babe,” see this as a mom movement. “The Make America Healthy Again movement is the strongest movement in America because it contains moms,” Hari said in a social media video.
She and others want the United States to follow Europe’s lead by creating far stricter food standards.
“Big Food” has been pushing back, though. A memo from the Consumer Brands Association warned a ban threatens the industry’s reliance on cheap, vibrant dyes to maintain product appeal and affordability.
Kennedy has also announced the complete review of the standard known as GRAS, or Generally Recognized as Safe.
“In 1958, the government created a designation called Generally Recognized as Safe or GRAS so that we can make common ingredients like salt and baking soda exempt from testing,” he explained in a social media video. “But today it isn’t just salt and baking soda. Food companies and cooperative regulators have enlarged the GRAS exemption so that these companies can decide for themselves whether a substance is Generally Recognized as Safe. No FDA approval is needed.”
It looks like that will be changing.
Restaurants are toeing the line as well.
Steak ‘n Shake has announced it will now cook its iconic shoestring fries with beef tallow, instead of seed oils.
And then there’s what HHS has dubbed “Operation Stork Speed.” The agency is aiming to update American baby formula standards, in a move to remove ingredients like seed oils and high fructose corn syrup.
All of these moves are generating excitement in the health world.
“I’m a person that believes that this immune system that God made for us is amazing,” John Richardson, founder of Operation World Without Cancer, told CBN News.
LINK: https://www.operationworldwithoutcancer.com
Richardson is thrilled about the changes being made under RFK, Jr.
“They got rid of the WHO (World Health Organization) and they started the Global Wellness Forum,” he said. “A very close friend of mine, Dr. Ed Group, is one of the people behind that. Marla Maples is on that team and it’s all about us bringing God-given, natural, not pharmaceutical, not patented drugs, to the forefront so that people can know we can heal so many of our problems including our poor nutrition by just bringing us back to a diet based on things that are natural and God-given.”
Critics are less enthusiastic, though.
Most of the criticism surrounding Kennedy continues to be about vaccines.
“He has, since 2005, been the main megaphone of not only anti-vaccine claims in America but anti-health science and conspiracy theories about health,” argued scientist and critic David Robert Grimes in a social media video.
Kennedy maintains he is not anti-vaccine and has praised the MMR vaccine in light of several measles outbreaks.
So, where does this movement go from here?
Katy Talento is an epidemiologist who served as a health advisor in the first Trump administration. She says one of Kennedy’s biggest tasks will be to get his HHS employees, many of them career civil servants, on board with his vision.
“I think they can be inspired by Secretary Kennedy’s agenda as long as he sticks to the science and really respects some of their institutional knowledge about how to get these things done and what authorities they have,” Talento told CBN News.
In terms of what she thinks could happen next, she anticipates an update to dietary guidelines. She also wants Kennedy to address the childhood vaccine schedule and focus on how various agencies got so much wrong during the COVID pandemic.
On top of fighting the country’s chronic disease epidemic, Kennedy has also taken on the issue of biological sex. In a guidance, he declared there to be only two biological sexes, male and female. In that same guidance, he added that human life begins at conception.
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