The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Food: The Root Causes of Our Healthcare, Economic and Social Crises with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Wed, 15 Jan 2025
You’ve probably heard a lot about Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but beyond social media sound bites, do you really know where he stands on the issues shaping America’s health? Recorded last year when Kennedy was a presidential candidate, this episode of The Dr. Hyman Show provides a deep dive into his vision for improving the well-being of Americans. A vision Kennedy could put into action if confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Kennedy is the founder of the Waterkeeper Alliance, the world’s largest clean water advocacy group, and served as its longtime chairman and attorney. He also founded the Children’s Health Defense and led efforts to address chronic disease and toxic exposures. As a litigator, he was part of the team that successfully prosecuted Monsanto for glyphosate’s link to cancer. Tune in to explore Kennedy’s stance on tackling chronic disease, promoting regenerative farming, and improving the quality of the water we drink and the air we breathe. In this episode, we discuss (audio version / Apple Subscriber version): The state of health in America (5:41 / 4:01) One of the main reasons RFK Jr. decided to run for president (8:39 / 6:59) The beginning of the autism epidemic (12:38 / 10:58) Addressing harms caused by ultra-processed food (15:03 / 13:23) Eliminating corporate culture in government agencies (33:05 / 28:41) America’s disproportionate deaths from COVID-19 (42:10 / 37:46) How America’s health status is affecting our national security (44:34 / 40:10) Solving the mental health crisis (47:41 / 43:17) Food and drug TV marketing (56:14 / 51:49) RFK’s thinking about fitness for himself and America (1:03:39 / 59:14) View Show Notes From This Episode Get Free Weekly Health Tips from Dr. Hyman Sign Up for Dr. Hyman’s Weekly Longevity Journal This episode is brought to you by Big Bold Health, Paleovalley, Fatty15, AirDoctor, and Seed. Receive 30% off Big Bold Health's Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat sprouted powder. Head to BigBoldHealth.Com and use code DRMARK30 at checkout. Get nutrient-dense, whole foods. Head to Paleovalley.com/Hyman for 15% off your first purchase. Head to Fatty15.com/HYMAN and use code HYMAN for 15% off your 90-day subscription Starter Kit. Get cleaner air. Right now, you can get up to $300 off at AirDoctorPro.com/DRHYMAN. Seed is offering my community 25% off to try DS-01® for themselves. Visit Seed.com/Hyman and use code 25HYMAN for 25% off your first month of Seed's DS-01® Daily Synbiotic.
Chapter 1: What are the root causes of America's health crisis?
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I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and this is a place for conversations that matter. Now, Americans are sicker than ever, and it's not only resulting in poor physical and mental health, it's impacting our economy, our environment, our children's future, and even our national security.
So today I'm talking about how we got here and what's needed to turn things around with my friend, activist, and presidential candidate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is an independent candidate for the president of the United States. He's the founder of the Waterkeeper Alliance, the world's largest clean water advocacy group, and served as its longtime chairman and attorney.
He then went on to found the Children's Health Defense, where he served as chairman and chief litigation counsel in his campaign to address childhood chronic disease and toxic exposures. He was also on the team that prosecuted and won the case against Monsanto for glyphosate's role in causing cancer.
As president, he promises to restore the middle class, to unwind the war machine, unravel corporate capture, end the chronic disease epidemic, which I care a lot about, secure the border, protect our wild places, improve the quality of the water we drink and the air we breathe, heal the divide, fix our public education system, take care of our veterans, support the trade, and make homes affordable again.
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Chapter 2: How did the obesity epidemic begin?
Yeah. You know, Bobby, there was a school in Washington I heard about that was really interesting. It was a charter school started by a very wealthy guy. And it was really for kids who were underserved, who came from poor socioeconomic environments. who are often going to be more likely to end up in jail than go to college.
And what they did with these kids was they not only just had a great academic curriculum, but they fed them three meals a day. The kids ate three meals of whole healthy food a day. And these kids did so well. They were going to Harvard, Yale, all the Ivy League colleges. They were succeeding.
And then all the parents of the wealthier neighborhoods wanted to send their kids to school because they were all having such high performance standards on testing. And I think in terms of research, we should be doing that research on what happens when you take a school and this one school gets this
typical standard school lunches, which is fully junk food and sugar versus a whole foods lunch and breakfast and dinner for kids and seeing what the different academic performances is, behavioral issues are, aggression is in schools, what their other issues are on ADD and allergies and autoimmunity, all these things we're seeing. It would be such a simple thing to do, but we've never done it.
We've never asked those questions. So I get very excited when I think about you starting to do these things with NIH. You know, in the NIH program, budget and their whole 100 plus page budget, food was only mentioned once.
And that was in the context of the Food and Drug Administration, which just makes me kind of crazy because it's the biggest thing that actually we can do to make a difference in our country's health.
Yeah, I love that idea. I love, you know, the idea of being able to, I mean, to me, Mark, as you know, kids are the biggest, you know, kids ought to be the focus of everything in this country. We shouldn't be, you know, talking so much about going to war in Ukraine.
It's $113 billion we're spending and we've already committed to the Ukraine war and we're, you know, President Biden wants to bring that up to $200 billion. Entire budget for EPA is $12 billion. Entire budget for the CDC is $12 billion.
Imagine if we had that money and instead of spending it on weapons and wars and making war in another country, what if we brought it home and made a war on bad health? Oh, made that the target and made our children healthy again. How much better off America would really be if we were giving kids three meals a day in school? They were good food. And that, you know, we had good education.
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Chapter 3: What role do ultra-processed foods play in chronic disease?
Chapter 4: How can corporate culture in government agencies be eliminated?
Chapter 5: What are the implications of America's health status on national security?
It took me a while to get you convinced. That's almost 10 years. And I was drinking a lot of coke. I was drinking like eight or nine cokes a day.
Yeah. So you're right, Bobby. The ultra-processed food is a huge issue. And it's exploded in the last decades. And it's really been one of those inciting factors that's driven our epidemic. And I think we're looking for a smoking diet.
By the way.
Chapter 6: How can we solve the mental health crisis in America?
i stay with no sugar in it there you go thanks bobby but you know we we really have you know smoking is an easy literally smoking gun and it's linked to lung cancer and so in food it's been very difficult because it's like what food should it be packed sugar or salt but i think that what we're coming to understand in science there's a huge body of evidence now that supports this is an ultra processed food which is really defined by this nova classification that the
grades food on how processed it is. Like, you know, tomato can is processed, but it's minimally processed.
Whereas, you know, a Twinkie is extremely processed and it's made up of deconstructed food ingredients that are originally food, but then they deconstructed into these molecular science projects and then reassemble them to look like something you could eat, but they're not really food by definition. And that has been driving the epidemic of obesity, diabetes, all these chronic illnesses.
It destroys our gut microbiome. It drives inflammation. It affects mental health. It's linked to depression, suicide, violence. It's quite interesting. And it also has increased mortality. For every 10% of your diet that's ultra-processed food, your risk of death goes up by 14%. plus percent of our diet as adults and 67% of kids' diets.
And I think, how would you think about addressing this as president? Because we are, in my view, we're seeing like a slow-moving tsunami. We're all getting our suntan on the beach, and this is coming at us so fast.
And we're really now going to see in the next generation the serious consequences, because our kids, like you mentioned, are all coming into adulthood sick and overweight and on lots of medications.
My inclination is to give people good information and at the same time maximize freedom. I wouldn't tell people what to eat and what not to eat, but what I would tell people is I'm going to take the NIH and bring it back to its original mission. Let me explain that. When I was a little kid, NIH was the gold standard scientific agency on Earth, just like NASA was for space.
But when I was a little boy, we lived in McLean, which is only a few minutes from Bethesda, Maryland. And my mother had an assistant who worked for her whose husband was a scientist at NIH. I used to go down to NIH because I was fascinated by science. And I would go and look at the guinea pigs and the rats and the mice and all the things they were doing.
And, you know, during that period, Mark, we had there were a lot of new countries that were beginning. There were 122 new nations that began after World War II and a lot of more African and colonial nations started. that got their sovereignty, they didn't have the money to have a real scientific agency.
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Chapter 7: What are the effects of food and drug marketing on public health?
So a lot of them in their constitutions and their statutory framework would say, if FDA approves it, if NIH says it's true, then we will consider it true. So they didn't even have their agencies, but they relied on ours because everybody trusted American science.
And then something happened to NIH and a whole bunch of, there was a lot of corporate capture, all these mechanisms of corporate capture. But most importantly, in 1980, the Buy Dole Act was passed. And that act gave NIH and NIH individual scientists the rights to collect royalties on any drug that they worked on.
So, for example, today, the Moderna vaccine was produced by NIH and it's made tens of billions of dollars. Well, half that money will go to NIH.
Yeah.
And some of that money goes to scientists who work at NIH. There's six scientists who get to collect one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year forever. Well, of course, if you have those kind of perverse economic incentives and conflicts of interest, it is going to subsume the regulatory function.
And beneath the kind of mercantile ambitions of those individuals who can make a lot of money, if you're paying for your boat and your alimony and your house and your children's education, a drug that you're supposed to be regulating, you may turn a blind eye. some of the problems with that drug, and you may do everything you can to get it through the regulatory process and get it mandated.
And that's what's happened. But not only that, the entire function of NIH has changed so that I think it was 2016 or 2017 when I actually did this calculation that was 220 new drugs approved by FDA, and all of them had come from NIH. So NIH is now the biggest incubator of pharmaceutical products.
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Chapter 8: What is RFK Jr.'s vision for health and fitness in America?
And what's happened is they're no longer doing what they're supposed to be doing, which is to answer the question, why do we have an autism epidemic? Why do we have an obesity epidemic? It's pretty easy to figure out. There's only a certain number of suspects. You have processed foods, the PFOAs. You have neonicotinoid pesticides, atrazine, glyphosate, cell phone radiation.
There's a limited universe, and you can figure out pretty easily which ones are causing which effects, and it's probably cumulative, so they're all probably working on similar biological pathways and hurting our kids. You can figure out that too. NIH does not do that science.
In fact, if you try to do that science, let's say you're a university, young associate professor at Stanford, and you say, hey, you know what? I have access to the vaccine. I have access to the California or the Florida health care records, so I can look at exposures that people made, and then subsequent medical claims, whether it's vaccines or, you know, your food, diet. You can look at all that.
I'm going to study and find out why do we have an autism epidemic? Why do we have an obesity epidemic? If you try to do those studies... You could easily jeopardize your job in the near future.
We call the NIH the National Institute of Health, but it's not really. It's diseases, and it's focused not on the root causes, which is really unfortunate.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go down to NIH during my first week in office, and I'm going to assemble all the division chairs and the branch chairs, and I'm going to say to them, we're going to do something different. We have a NIH... has a $42 billion annual budget. It distributes that money to 56,000 scientists, mainly at universities, to develop new drugs and to do studies.
I'm going to say we are going to make it our priority now, as fast as possible, to fund studies that are going to tell us what's causing this epidemic. And then I'm going to get those studies funded and And I'm going to get them underway, every way of looking at them. I'm also going to call in all the scientific journals into the Justice Department.
And I'm going to say to them, you've been serving the entrant. You've been lying to the public. You are representing yourself as a neutral person. and reliable source of health information. And you have done tremendous damage to public health because you are not that. You are publishing fake science that is designed to promote the mercantile ambitions of the pharmaceutical industry.
And of the food industry, of the big agricultural interests, of the oil and gas and coal and all these other big, powerful industries. And you're lying to the public and you've caused tremendous damage to public health. And I'm going to hold you responsible. I'm going to litigate against you under the racketeering laws, under the general tort laws. I'm going to find a way.
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