Who would be so callous as to not want our children to be healthy?
The Make America Healthy Again movement, now firmly ensconced in the White House under the leadership of Robert F. Kennedy Jr, released last week called 鈥淭he MAHA Report.鈥� It鈥檚 meant to give a bird鈥檚-eye view of the problem with American children鈥檚 health, paving the way for a multipronged strategy due next August.
Most people will not read the document itself. Rather, they will hear the MAHA architects being interviewed about it, and these snippets will often sound reasonable. But the report is Orwellian: it blends in truths and falsehoods, and the solutions it proposes are often wildly contradicted by the actions of the Trump regime.
It looks like science but the MAHA Report is mostly 鈥渄ata vibes.鈥�
Healthy enough to die for the state
Simply summing up this report as a pack of lies does a disservice to the public. It gets some things right, which is precisely why it is so insidious.
Chronic diseases are real, and many like diabetes and asthma affect a lot of children. Fruits and vegetables aren鈥檛 as appealing as sugary treats; ads for ultra-processed foods bombard the airwaves and the Internet; and teenagers struggle with anxiety, depression, and loneliness.
The report gets the vibes right: it certainly feels like American children鈥攁nd, I would argue, children in many countries of the Global North鈥攁re unwell. But vibes can be misleading. Americans have of how much local crime is committed, in part because sensational offenses get centre-stage in news reports, true-crime podcasts and scripted dramas. What feels right can be an exaggeration of reality.
Then there鈥檚 the question of what spurred this report. When its authors write that their changes will ensure that all Americans 鈥渓ive longer, healthier lives, supported by systems to prioritize prevention, wellbeing, and resilience,鈥� it sounds like music to my ears.
But something interesting emerges in the first few pages of the report: the U.S. government wants more soldiers. 鈥淥ver 75% of American youth,鈥� the authors write, 鈥渁re ineligible for military service鈥攑rimarily due to obesity, poor physical fitness, and/or mental health challenges.鈥� In fact, the introduction itself begins with positioning children鈥檚 afflictions as a 鈥渢hreat to our nation鈥檚 health, economy, and military readiness,鈥� with Dr. Oz confirming on that being healthy is 鈥渁 patriotic duty.鈥� As pointed out by a user on the social media platform Bluesky, there鈥檚 a deep irony in making someone healthy enough to go and die for the state.
The MAHA Report is not a beneficent, populist roadmap to eradicating diseases: it is in part a military document.
Data needs to be interpreted
Despite its footnotes that cite respectable data sources like U.S. department reports, the Cochrane Collaboration, and multiple meta-analyses, MAHA鈥檚 assessment is filled with questionable or misleading claims.
Take its mention that the number of children diagnosed with cancer in the United States since 1975 has risen over 40%. There is a lot to unpack that the report does not even address. Better diagnostic tools and their increased use explain some of this rise: you can鈥檛 count what you鈥檙e not measuring. Even though many of these cancers are indeed more common now, children tend to thanks to scientific progress. A published this year and using the same data cited by the MAHA report concluded that the underlying causes of this increase in cancer incidence in children 鈥渞emain unclear.鈥� Instead of admitting to the complexity of understanding why children get cancer, Kennedy鈥檚 assessment points a hesitant finger in the direction of the modern American diet, aspartame, microplastics, and yes, electromagnetic radiation from cell phones and Wi-Fi routers.
Then there鈥檚 diabetes. In the 1980s, type 2 diabetes in children was very rare, but its incidence has 鈥渃onsistently increased the past two decades.鈥� One of the big reasons for this鈥攏ot mentioned in the report鈥攊s a massive shift in diagnostics. In the past, many people had undiagnosed diabetes: they simply didn鈥檛 know they had it, or they were part of a large study that followed them over time, they had an abnormal blood glucose measurement on a blood test for the study but were never diagnosed as having diabetes by their doctor. While undiagnosed cases still exist, . Routine diabetes screening for people with no symptoms became recommended in the late 1990s by professional groups; the red-flag threshold for fasting blood glucose was lowered in 1997; and a test measuring the amount of hemoglobin in your blood that is bound to glucose (the HbA1c test) came into use in 2009, adding convenience. All of that impacts who gets counted.
When we look at how many American teenagers are being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes each year from 2003 to 2018 (per ), we see something interesting: the line for 鈥淲hite, non-Hispanic鈥� is basically flat. The lines for other ethnicities are the ones going up dramatically over time. Experts know that higher rates of diabetes among African-Americans and Hispanic people are associated with . Given the Trump regime鈥檚 crackdown on 鈥淒EI鈥� (meaning anything focusing on women, queer people, and non-white ethnicities), the MAHA people are unlikely to do anything concrete about high rates of type 2 diabetes in non-whites.
We also see in the MAHA Report a stubborn refusal to confront known answers to important problems. The United States does in life expectancy among high-income countries, as it underlines, but the reason isn鈥檛 cell phone radiation. As toxicologist Ryan Marino , we know the major drivers of this: deaths from assaults (including ), , COVID-19, a lack of access to healthcare (the U.S. being the only high-income country that ), and truly for infants and pregnant women. To ignore mountains of data and wonder out loud if food dyes are to blame is to bury your head in the sands of the square one fallacy: we鈥檒l simply pretend we have no data on this so we can fund studies that will hold responsible the culprits we鈥檝e chosen in advance.
We see this clearly with autism: the report scares parents with skyrocketing rates without mentioning that diagnostic criteria have changed and that awareness of the condition has bloomed. The report makes no distinction between neurodivergent and functional children and those requiring constant care, in order to drum up a justification for an upcoming study conducted by a pseudoscientist charged with practicing medicine without a license, a study which will, of course, finger vaccines by torturing the data long enough.
Studying autism is not easy, but the data we have right now shows the condition to have genetic roots (and absolutely no link to vaccines). Robert F. Kennedy Jr, meanwhile, played the square one fallacy, claiming he鈥檇 have figured out autism鈥檚 cause by September, before . This is not science; it鈥檚 motivated reasoning.
鈥淭hrowing insulin at people鈥�
We now arrive at what the report gets completely wrong and how its proposed solutions are already contradicted by Donald Trump鈥檚 actions.
The MAHA Report states that childhood health has, over the last three decades, 鈥渓argely worsened,鈥� calling today鈥檚 children 鈥渢he sickest generation in American history in terms of chronic disease.鈥� As Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, an epidemiologist based in Australia, on social media, this portrait is heavily doctored. Life expectancy in the United States has over the last 145 years (with two notable dips accounting for the 1918 influenza and COVID-19); the average number of years lived without disease or disability from 64.8 in 1990 to 66.2 just before the pandemic; and diseases that used to severely debilitate us if not outright kill us have often been tamed by modern medicine.
Meanwhile, on the subject of diabetes, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary himself鈥攐ne of the authors of the MAHA Report鈥� that 鈥渕aybe we need to treat more diabetes with cooking classes, not just throwing insulin at people.鈥� The on cooking classes to improve health outcomes is that, while they make people feel better about what they eat, they don鈥檛 really change BMI, blood pressure, or blood cholesterol levels. Makary was using 鈥渃ommon sense鈥� and ignoring the evidence, but the truth is not always intuitive. That鈥檚 why we conduct studies, especially when it comes to changing individual habits to improve health, which is a notoriously difficult thing to achieve.
Withholding life-saving medications like insulin is particularly egregious given that Makary is the at Johns Hopkins, and the pancreatic islets secrete insulin. Alas, rolling back drug availabilities seems to be one of the goals of the MAHA branch of the U.S. government, which also demonizes stimulants for ADHD. How do RFK Jr and his co-authors justify their hard stance against mental health medication? In part by citing papers that don鈥檛 exist. As was revealed by Emily Kennard and Margaret Manto, at least seven of the studies listed in the MAHA Report鈥攚ith many focused on medications aimed at children and teenagers鈥�, with their cited authors confirming as much. Did whoever write this section ask ChatGPT to generate papers that show these drugs are bad? This looks like fraud, either through laziness or malice, and I hope journalists keep asking RFK Jr and his cronies about these fake papers every chance they get.
Finally, the MAHA report goes off the rails with the improbable boogeymen of the wellness industry. It calls the sugar substitute aspartame a possible carcinogen, even though you鈥檒l be fine unless you consume 36 cans of diet soda every day. It scares the reader with ambiguous results over electromagnetic radiation, citing the National Toxicology Program which reported that a rare form of cancer was increased not in mice exposed to cell phone radiation, nor in female rats, but in male rats only. It demonizes plant-based oils and wants to bring back animal fats, regardless of what the evidence actually states. It says fluoride lowers IQ鈥攁ctually, poor studies find such an association with fluoride levels much higher than typically found in American drinking water, while .
And it fearmongers about the number of injections American children get as more vaccines get added to the immunization schedule, daring to claim that anti-vaccine doctors have been silenced by the establishment, which 鈥渦ndermines the open dialogue鈥� necessary to care for children.
Ignorance is strength
While the MAHA commission speaks out of one side of the government鈥檚 mouth to defend children鈥檚 health, some of its members speak out of the other side when they act to strip America of important regulations. CDC staff who respond to were fired recently. Congress voted to undo regulations that restrict the amount of emitted by American industries. Last April, the FDA suspended due to job cuts by RFK Jr, and millions of Americans will soon , a program that gives health insurance to adults and children with limited income, as well as . The MAHA Report is an exercise in hypocrisy.
And this document has the audacity to cite the work of Kevin D. Hall not once but twice. An expert on ultra-processed food and a leader in conducting gold-standard science on diets, he due to censorship enacted by aides of Robert F. Kennedy Jr himself when Hall鈥檚 results didn鈥檛 simplistically show that ultra-processed food is as addictive as drugs.
Do not believe the words of the MAHA movement when they say they want to bring in transparent science, gum up the revolving door between industry and government, and kick out ultra-processed food. Their speeches and documents are Orwellian, and on gold-standard science and RFK Jr鈥檚 goal of barring government scientists from publishing in major, so-called 鈥渃orrupt鈥� scientific journals (in favour of ) are yet more salvoes worthy of the Ministry of Truth. Their actions give them away, not their words.
The MAHA coalition is a clown car for the aggrieved minority. There are real health issues to probe, understand, and intervene on, but the quacks and contrarians of MAHA can only point to a mirage. While they wield governmental power, they do not represent the mainstream.
The crowning of pseudoscience in the United States has mobilized many science communicators and experts to speak up, so if you want a media diet that is more evidence based, I encourage you to follow people like nutrition scientist , molecular biologist , immunologist , exercise scientist , biomedical scientist , toxicologist , registered dietitian , epidemiologist , and of course our own Office at 9I制作厂免费.
This list is not even close to being exhaustive, because so many actual experts are pushing back against the falsehoods of the minority associated with the MAHA commission.
George Orwell鈥檚 Nineteen Eighty-Four ends with鈥攕poiler alert鈥攖he protagonist finally giving in to authoritarianism and propaganda. 鈥淏ut it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.鈥�
By listening to scientists outside the MAHA movement, we don鈥檛 have to agree that 2 + 2 equals 5.
Take-home message:
- The MAHA Report (Assessment) provides a roadmap for Robert F. Kennedy Jr鈥檚 department to address ill health in American children and teenagers
- When the report shows diseases are more common now than they used to be, it never explains that this is due in part to better and more routinely used diagnostic tools
- The report wrongly blames ill health on things like aspartame, fluoride, and cell phone radiation, and the section on how teenagers are allegedly overmedicalized cites scientific papers that do not exist
- The actions of the Trump regime have so far endangered the health of children and teenagers, by rolling back regulations and eviscerating health agencies
