US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.Heather Diehl/Getty Images
The new food pyramid says it all. In January, the federal government released updated dietary guidelines for Americans that reimagine the pyramid by literally turning it upside down. The guidelines, which once prioritized foods like grains while minimizing fats, now recommend red meat, whole milk, proteins, and healthy fats. It’s one of the most unmistakable ways that US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has ushered the Make America Healthy Again movement into the federal government. But it’s also illustrative of how the entire Trump administration has tried to turn just about everything in Washington on its head.
And it’s not just the food pyramid. Over the last year, RFK Jr. has reshaped the country’s vaccine advisory committee with vaccine skeptics, fired thousands of employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, and revised the CDC’s stance on the unfounded link between vaccines and autism. The moves, often influenced and cheered by folks in the MAHA movement, are ones that infectious disease epidemiologist Jessica Malaty Rivera says are not merely misguided, but dangerous.
“MAHA is asking the right question: How do we make America healthy again? But they’ve come to the table with answers already to that question that are not rooted in evidence. And that’s the concerning part,” Rivera tells host Al Letson. “This is not saying science should never be questioned. Science is always being questioned. But when you come in with answers to questions and hypotheses already, that’s the backwards way to do science.”
On this week’s More To The Story, Rivera examines how Big Ag has influenced the nation’s latest dietary guidelines, whether the US is on the cusp of a national measles outbreak, and why the CDC dropping vaccine recommendations could have potentially long-term and deadly consequences.
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