The Trump administration recently released a long-promised report decrying the sorry state of the health of American children and saying how it planned to change this.
They correctly begin by noting that “Despite outspending peer nations by more than double per capita on health care, the United States ranks last in life expectancy among high-income countries and suffers higher rates of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes.” Unfortunately, they then largely focus their prescriptions on the wrong solutions.
The four areas on which they propose to work to improve our children’s health are ultra-processed food, chemicals in our environment, the lack of exercise due to the digital age, and over-medication and excessive vaccination.
I support (and have written about) reducing the over-abundance of ultra-processed food, particularly the use of high-fructose corn syrup in our diet, but to date the Robert F. Kennedy Jr.-run FDA has spent its energy on trivia such as red food coloring rather than going after big agriculture and big food, perhaps because these groups are big lobbyists and political contributors.
Our food supply does contain too many pesticides, but hunger and malnutrition threaten more American children than do pesticides, and the gutting of the social safety net by the Trump administration will make this problem worse.
More exercise is good for us all, children and adults, so we should be expanding access to outdoor spaces, including national parks, not limiting them as has been done with cutbacks to the National Park Service.
What is most telling about this report is what it does not cover.
The chemical that is the biggest threat to health is nicotine and the carcinogens in cigarettes, but there is not a word in this report about tackling the problem of youth vaping, which has been shown to lead to nicotine addiction and life-long smoking.
The insistence on reducing childhood vaccination, a cause that has made millions for Kennedy through his referrals of plaintiffs to class-action suits, is an enormous threat to children’s health. The disinformation spread by Kennedy and his allies has led to reduced rates of vaccination. Fewer children are being vaccinated, which means that diseases once thought eliminated, such as measles and whooping cough, are already making a resurgence. Thousands of American children, and millions world-wide, will die if the anti-vax movement holds sway.
Finally, no mention in the report is made of the leading cause of death in U.S. children and adolescents: death from motor vehicle accidents and firearms. Unlike every other Western country, an American teenager is much more likely to die by suicide or homicide with a gun than from illness. If Kennedy and his followers truly cared about America’s children, gun control would be top of their priority list. Its absence says it all.
Edward Hoffer is an internal medicine physician and author of Prescription for Bankruptcy: A doctor’s perspective on America’s failing health care system and how we can fix it.
