When Robert Kennedy Jr. (RFK) was confirmed as HHS director last February, overseeing the CDC, NIH, CMS, and FDA, many worried that modern medicines would become unavailable or scarce.

Instead, industry has received unexpected windfalls and green lights from the new policies. Exhibit A: the exoneration of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) from its well-documented links to cancer and cardiovascular effects. The “timing theories” at Wake Forest that helped turn HRT on its head were funded by Organon and Wyeth. Read the disclosures, people.

While public health officials were still reeling from HRT reversals, RFK’s food revisionism began with a new, industry-funded food pyramid that threw documented links between saturated fat and elevated LDL cholesterol, heart disease and stroke, weight gain and obesity, and type 2 diabetes risks to the wind. Also kicked to the curb were the links between red meat, processed or not, and breast cancer, which caused 81,500 global annual deaths.

Under-acknowledged food production risks

Unlike the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), founded to protect the public, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) was founded to support food producers. Is that why food production facts like these are downplayed if not censored?

• The European Union (EU) has banned U.S. beef since 1989 because American cattle are often treated with hormones like estradiol-17, trenbolone acetate, and zeranol.
• Ractopamine, a widely used and controversial U.S. livestock growth promoter, is categorically banned in many Asian and EU countries and in Russia.
• Antibiotics, used in the U.S. for growth promotion, are heavily restricted in the EU and many parts of Asia. They are medically linked to UTIs and obesity in children exposed through maternal use.
• Genetically modified animals like the “GalSafe” pig, approved in the U.S. in 2020, are in the food supply, often unlabeled.
• Fast-growing U.S. poultry (big chickens) with myopathies like “woody breast” and “white striping,” characterized by a loss of myofibers and more fibrous tissue, are becoming the poultry norm.
• Cloned meat has been on U.S. dinner tables for more than a decade.
• The U.S.’s chlorine-dipped chickens (killing microbes when antibiotics fail) are banned in the EU and elsewhere.

Is the new pyramid a nod to industry?

The new food pyramid stresses the importance of protein in human diets. Is it a nod to the millions of Americans on glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) drugs for weight loss who are seeking protein? Do GLP-1 makers and RFK know that the U.K. bans fattening food ads in public and online to control national obesity instead of just relying on prescriptions? Thanks to the Wall Street GLP-1 agonist boom, the role of fast-food marketing and availability in obesity is an afterthought if not ignored altogether.

Moreover, in a recent video, food expert Marion Nestle confirms what many suspected: GLP-1 agonists must be taken for life. To address GLP-1 agonist side effects like muscle loss, drugmakers are now rolling out “add-on” drugs like Eli Lilly’s antibody bimagrumab. Will they need to be taken for life too? Add-on drugs have been pivotal revenue streams in depression drug marketing and psychoactive drug marketing, the latter for the side effect tardive dyskinesia.

Lard is a health food?

Seed oils have been demonized by currently dominant “alt” health sources, with lard elevated into a “health food.” Yet no major scientific or medical studies show seed oils harmful; they actually have the action of lowering heart disease risks.

Moreover, food animals raised in industrial conditions host diseases like liver flukes, eyeworms, lungworms, stomach worms, thin-necked intestinal worms, whipworms, aspergillosis, avian influenza, avian leucosis, histomoniasis, coccidiosis, coronavirus, typhoid, fowl cholera, mites, lice, herpes, clostridial dermatitis, and cellulitis. Hardly whole and wholesome foods. In fact, many receive vaccines.

Whether the resurrection of HRT, the industry-slanted food pyramid, or the new lard and “protein” infatuation, government medical revisionism under RFK will hardly “Make America Healthy Again.”

Martha Rosenberg is an investigative reporter whose work has appeared in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), Consumer Reports, Public Citizen, the Center for Health Journalism at USC Annenberg, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, and other outlets. She studied at Rush Medical School and writes on health care, food, medicine, and public policy.

Rosenberg’s reporting has been cited by Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Mayo Clinic Proceedings, Public Library of Science Biology, ScienceDirect, the Journal of Pain & Palliative Care Pharmacotherapy, the Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, Britannica, National Geographic, Hastings Law Journal, and Wikipedia. She is the author of several books, including Multidisciplinary Management of Chronic Pain: A Practical Guide for Clinicians, Born With a Junk Food Deficiency, Big Food, Big Pharma, Big Lies, and Food, Clothes, Men, Gas and Other Problems. She publishes on Substack, OpEdNews, and her Amazon author page.