7 hours agoShareSaveShareSaveBBCThere’s a saying that Robert F Kennedy Jr is very fond of. He used it on the day he was confirmed as US health secretary. “A healthy person has a thousand dreams, a sick person only has one,” he said as he stood in the Oval Office. “60% of our population has only one dream – that they get better.”The most powerful public health official in the US has made it his mission to tackle what he describes as an epidemic of chronic illness in America, a catch-all term that covers everything from obesity and diabetes to heart disease.His diagnosis that the US is experiencing an epidemic of ill health is a view shared by many healthcare experts in the country.But Kennedy also has a history of promoting unfounded health conspiracies, from the suggestion that Covid-19 targeted and spared certain ethnic groups to the idea that chemicals in tap water could be making children transgender.And after taking office, he slashed thousands of jobs at the Department of Health and Human Services and eliminated whole programmes at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).”On the one hand, it’s extraordinarily exciting to have a federal official take on chronic disease,” says Marion Nestle, a retired professor of public health at New York University. “On the other, the dismantling of the federal public health apparatus cannot possibly help with the agenda.”Chip Somodevilla / Staff via GettyKennedy is reviled by parts of the medical and scientific communities. He was described to me as an “evil nihilist” by Dr Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease doctor and senior scholar at Johns Hopkins University.But even some of Kennedy’s critics accept that he is bringing drive and ambition to areas of healthcare that have been neglected. Is it possible that the man who attracts so much criticism – and in some quarters, hate – might actually start making America healthy again?American ‘kids swimming in a toxic soup’There’s one industry that Kennedy had set his sights on long before joining the Trump administration: multinational food companies have, he has said, poisoned American children with artificial additives already banned in other countries.”We have a generation of kids who are swimming around in a toxic soup right now,” he claimed on Fox News last year.His first target was food colourings, with a promise to phase out the use of petroleum-based dyes by the end of 2026.Chemicals, with names like ‘Green No. 3’ and ‘Red No. 40’, have been linked to hyperactivity and behavioural issues in children, and cancer in some animal studies.”What’s happening in this administration is really interesting,” says Vani Hari, a food blogger and former Democrat who is now an influential voice in the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement. “MAHA is all about how do we get people off processed food, and one way to do that is to regulate the chemicals companies use.”There are some signs this pressure may be paying off.The food giant PepsiCo, for example, said in a recent trading update that Lays crisps and Tostitos snacks “will be out of artificial colours by the end of this year”.Kennedy struck a voluntary agreement with the food industry but it only came after individual states from California to West Virginia had already started introducing their own laws.”In the case of food dyes, companies will have to act because states are banning them [anyway] and they won’t want to have to formulate separate products for separate states,” says Prof Nestle, an author and longtime critic of the industry.More recently Kennedy has signalled he backs a radical food bill in Texas that could target additives in some products ranging from sweets, to cereals and fizzy drinksJeff Greenberg via Getty ImagesPackets may soon have to carry a high-contrast label stating, “WARNING: This product contains an ingredient that is not recommended for human consumption by the appropriate authority in Australia, Canada, the European Union, or the United Kingdom.”The Consumer Brands Association, which represents some of the largest food manufacturers, opposes this, saying the ingredients used in the US food supply are safe and have been rigorously studied.It’s difficult to imagine that kind of regulation could ever be signed off in a state like Texas without the political backing of Kennedy and President Trump.Is RFK ‘drifting into misinformation’?”He can’t change everything in a short amount of time, but I think the issue of food dyes will soon be history,” says Ms Hari, who testified before the Senate on this subject last year.But others worry that the flurry of announcements on additives is tinkering around the edges of what is a much wider …
