The Coming Health Culture Wars Will Be Tedious and Miserable

Making America Healthy Again, one Big Mac at a time: First it was the Kamala Harris claim that she worked at McDonald’s, a probably true but not totally proven story about a job she took back in college, told to try to make her seem middle-class and relatable. Then it was Donald Trump’s shift at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania in the final month of the campaign. Now it’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which oversees the nation’s food regulators—being hazed by Trump and co., forced to eat burgers and fries on a private jet flying to a UFC match.

RFK Jr. essentially being hazed here with the McDonalds pic.com/hH3N8GwkhE

— Andy Kaczynski (@KFILE) November 17, 2024

Theories abound about what RFK Jr. will do as HHS head. The discourse has turned to possible culprits for mass obesity and chronic disease. Seed oils? Food dyes? Too much added sugar in food? (Certainly that last one.) And of course, this has all spiraled into a discourse about elites unwilling to admit that McDonald’s tastes good, further purported proof of the disconnect between the ruling class and the masses.

All of this is to say that the coming health culture wars will be tedious and miserable, made worse by RFK Jr. serving as generalissimo.

“President Trump has asked me to do three things: 1. Clean up the corruption in our government health agencies. 2. Return those agencies to their rich tradition of gold-standard, evidence-based science. 3. Make America Healthy Again by ending the chronic disease epidemic,” writes Kennedy on X. Note the rhetorical trick here: the use of the word return implies these agencies are not currently engaged in evidence-based science but Kennedy will come to the rescue.

There’s a bit of a tension here, in that RFK Jr. wants to slash major parts of these agencies, ridding them of festering corruption, but he also wants to empower the regulators further to drive various food products and additives out of circulation.

Some changes Kennedy might make could be a good thing. He is a proponent, for example, of raw milk, which consumers should be free to buy and producers should be free to sell. (Many states make it quite hard to do so.) But he also frequently goes after the wrong culprits, like when he talks about how using high-fructose corn syrup, instead of real sugar, is a major factor contributing to obesity. That much is true, but the way to solve for that is not to direct more state muscle to cracking down; it’s to remove the sugar tariffs and corn subsidies that led to it being this way in the first place. The cheapness of high-fructose corn syrup is an artifact of government policy, and sometimes the solution is as simple as repealing existing bad laws on the books. As for the last bit—getting Americans to consume less sugar—that may be an area where the culture should change, but it isn’t one where health bureaucrats should punish people’s choices.

This is all par for the course with Kennedy, though. He gets a few things right, but he consistently muddles the details and blames the wrong culprits.

Another example: Kennedy wants to review vaccine safety data, to figure out which vaccines should be pulled from market. “People ought to have a choice, and that choice ought to be informed by the best information,” Kennedy told NBC earlier this month. “So I’m gonna make sure the scientific safety studies and efficacy studies are out there, and people can make individual assessments about whether that product is gonna be good for them.” If Kennedy wants to put those studies in a more prominent part of the HHS website so citizens can review them more easily, that’s fine with me. But this isn’t exactly top-secret stuff.

Unsurprisingly, when Kennedy was picked for the HHS role late last week, pharmaceutical companies’ shares plummeted. Toward the end of last week, following the announcement, Pfizer fell 4.6 percent, Eli Lilly fell 4.2 percent, Amgen fell 4.9 percent, and Novo Nordisk fell more than 3.1 percent. The government should not be trying to serve these companies’ bottom lines, but it is worth remembering that these companies are a net good for society. America is a leader in drug innovation, in part because there are real incentives to innovate here. America is a leader in food innovation—such as genetically modified crop development—for much the same reason. The crusade to rid America of the products that have somewhat irrationally earned RFK Jr.’s scorn may end up doing collateral damage we’ll come to regret.

In the meantime, it’s hilarious that his own commander in chief is forcing him to eat seed-oil-ified Mickey D’s.

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Scenes from New York: “At least 146,000 public school students in New York City did not have permanent housing at some point during the past school year, a record number and a 23 percent increase from the year before, according to Advocates for Children of New York,” reports The New York Times. “Almost all of those students were living either in shelters across the city or ‘doubled up’ temporarily with friends or family, according to the group, which focuses on supporting children from low-income families.” (So not “homeless” per se, despite what the headline suggests.)

Surely a huge part of this growth has to do with the influx of immigrants in a city whose regulations have made it infamously difficult to create more housing. It’s predicted that about one-third of the total recently-arrived migrant population consists of school-aged children, most of whom live in temporary shelters across the five boroughs.

“They’re going to write this off as a migrant problem, and it’s not,” Christine Quinn, the chief executive of Win, the city’s largest operator of homeless shelters, told The New York Times. But if Quinn offered stats to back this up or provided any alternate theories as to what is going on, the Times did not print them.

“Migrant children have made up most of the increase,” reported the Times at the end of last year, referring to the increase of “homeless” kids during the 2022–2023 school year. It’s unclear whether the same is true for 2023–2024, but it’s certainly plausible.

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QUICK HITS

• “President Joe Biden has authorized Ukraine to use U.S.-supplied missiles to strike deeper inside Russia, easing limitations on the longer range weapons as Russia deploys thousands of North Korean troops to reinforce its war, according to a U.S. official and three other people familiar with the matter,” per the Associated Press.
• The strength of RFK Jr.’s philosophy is “that he holds corporations to a high standard,” writes Vinay Prasad. “As a weakness, he is likely to believe in false safety signals (e.g. MMR, autism), and he is prone to support cheap, repurposed medications that don’t work. If medications cost a lot, he would probably be more skeptical of the evidence, but not if they are cheap. That’s the anti-corporatist in him, and his blindspot.”
• “Are you expecting to close down entire agencies?” Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo asked Vivek Ramaswamy, who has been tapped to lead the Department of Government Efficiency alongside Elon Musk, over the weekend. His reply: “We expect mass reductions. We expect entire agencies to be deleted outright.”
• “In a situationship, there’s frequently not just the imbalance of one partner who cares more than the other, but also an inner turmoil in each person—the dueling desires to embrace domestic security and the urge to be unburdened and unrestrained by romantic commitments,” writes Reasoner Emma Camp for Slate. “While it’s easy to dismiss situationships’ rising popularity as just another permutation of age-old dating woes, there’s an important hitch. Unlike previous cohorts of young people, Generation Z is afflicted with endemic risk aversion—a personality feature that makes many current twentysomethings uniquely commitment-phobic. In fact, Gen Z might just be the most risk-averse generation on record.”
• Activist histrionics are bad:

This reply to Josh totally captures the absurd way the left insists on talking about trans stuff. You’ll say “it’s not important that trans women can be on a swim team” and they’ll immediately be like “what about trans genocide??” pic.com/rCAYcnXBEE

— Ben Dreyfuss (@bendreyfuss) November 17, 2024

• How the Japanese town of Nagi actually managed to up its birth rate (to 2.7, roughly twice the national average) in a major way:

i.e. the biggest hurdle is finding people who want to have children, but once you find them, the incentives of these policies can actually work

maybe they have to take place within a context where community bonds can form (small towns or tight-knit cities, e.g. hasidic brooklyn)

— eververdant (@ever_verdant) November 17, 2024