When Robert F. Kennedy, Jr highlighted the crisis of chronic childhood diseases in his speech endorsing Donald Trump last August, his critics and much of the legacy media dismissed him. Nine months later, the Trump administration has embraced the cause.

Anyone in doubt about that should read the first White House report of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission, which was published yesterday. The Commission is chaired by Kennedy, now Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, and features other prominent administration officials including USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, and FDA Commissioner Marty Makary.

The report outlines the massive increase in youth health problems in the country that spends more per capita on healthcare than any nation in history. Many of these diseases are metabolic: obesity, diabetes, and Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease. Others involve the immune system, such as asthma, allergies, and autoimmune disorders. Still others are psychiatric, such as depression and anxiety.

Perhaps the most baffling development is the massive spike in autism spectrum disorder. Largely thanks to Kennedy’s messaging, millions of people now know that this once-rare condition reportedly affects one in 31 American children. Even if better diagnostics explain part of this rise, the trend is obvious. Moreover, most of the uptick in chronic illness has happened over the last few decades, so we can be sure the culprit for this non-infectious epidemic is something we have changed in our environment.

The MAHA Commission focuses on four key drivers of such change: food, exposure to environmental chemicals, the pervasive use of technology and a corresponding decline in physical exercise, and the overuse of medication that sometimes creates more problems than it solves. The Commission recognises that some of these drivers have profound upsides. The massive industrialisation of food after the Second World War, for instance, saved millions of lives. At the same time, the shift from whole foods to insulin-spiking “ultra-processed” food has evidently taken a toll on children’s health.

Similarly, many drugs have benefits. But they can also have serious costs. According to the MAHA Commission, efforts to identify the causes for chronic “diseases of civilization” are stymied by a corrupt nexus of government agencies, massive corporations in food and pharma, “special interest Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and professional associations”. This cartel largely controls the research in food and drugs, as well as the media messaging around that research.

For some MAHA activists eager to reform America’s food, farming, and drug markets, the Commission’s first report may seem overly cautious. It does not call for a ban on specific pesticides or vaccines. What it does manage, however, is to reframe the debate over public health and set a bold agenda to reform the system that is exacerbating the outbreak of childhood illnesses. That’s a giant step in the right direction.

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Dr Jay W. Richards is the director of the DeVos Center and chair of the Restoring American Wellness Initiative at The Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC.

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