Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his Children's Defense Fund and his work as a trial lawyer for Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) has always been in a war against science. He has been at war for decades. He sued over the COVID-19 vaccine, as you'd expect from his wealthy white perch where organic food and supplement shoppers also reside, but really only shot to prominence outside the anti-vaccine and organic food industry when he abandoned his presidential campaign and endorsed Republican Donald Trump.
His goal, he claimed, was a spin on Make America Great Again - Make America Healthy Again.
It's laudable. With cigarettes continuing to decline and government finally getting serious about the addictive carcinogen that gets a cultural free pass - alcohol - obesity could surpass both and become the top lifestyle killer.
Yet Kennedy doesn't want to help humans violate our biological mandate due to hundreds of thousands of years of evolution - we don't know when our next meal will be, eat what you can now - and encourage us to treat food like an essential commodity, he wants to ban gimmicks and populist fads like "ultra-processed food", whatever that means this week. Just like when he worked at NRDC or when the Obama administration gave his solar company a gigantic payday for nothing.(1)
One thing that "ultra-processed" and "organic pesticides" and others face is that their claims are only based on epidemiology. No science involved. You just have to believe.
If Big Pharma and Big Food and Big Chemical are all looking for new ways to kill us (or at least make us ill so Big Medicine can make money treating us), where are the bodies?
Instead, modern pesticides and modern medicine and improved health care have caused revolutionary declines in things that previous generations correlated to everything - cardiovascular disease.
Credit: Our World In Data
Instead of the modern world killing us, as environmental groups and their lawyers claim, we are living better than ever. Instead of killing us, the modern world has led to a 400% decline in the US and nearly 500% in France and the United Kingdom.
We should all applaud better health. In my book on mitochondria research I advocate that we want to "square the curve" of aging, so we live better and suddenly die rather than having 20 years of increased infirmity, and the way to do that is to end smoking, alcohol use, and obesity - not picking winners and losers in the organic and supplement and acupuncture industries we know don't work.
NOTE:
(1) Really, the $1.4 billion payday was for all the money Kennedy raised for Obama. The Senator was on his side about vaccines causing autism and then the President-Elect floated him to run EPA but pulled the idea when he found that, like antisemitism, vaccine denial was only popular among progressives on the coasts.
