In Bipartisan Panel, Kennedy Offers Solutions for America’s Chronic Disease Epidemic

By Adam Garrie The Kenendy Beacon

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. delivered the keynote address at “American Health and Nutrition: A Second Opinion,” hosted by Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI). The event was held on September 23, in the Kennedy Caucus Room in the Senate.

The capacity crowd of 300 guests was joined by an online audience of over 100,000 across multiple streaming platforms. Speakers at the event included Harvard’s Dr. Chris Palmer, Stanford graduate and public health advocate Dr. Casey Means, New York Times best-selling author Calley Means, journalist and health advocate Vani Hari, and Senator Johnson. 

In his address, Kennedy outlined major problems with and solutions to America’s health crises. 

Kennedy explained that it is wrong to measure the state of the nation’s health with statistics detailing money spent on healthcare and earned by insurance and pharmaceutical companies. Instead, Kennedy said that the state of healthcare should be measured by patient outcomes including life expectancy, chronic disease levels and childhood obesity. In all of these areas, the U.S., he said, is far behind other countries with smaller economies. 

“We spend four times per capita on health care than the Italians,” Kennedy said. But Italians live 7.5 years longer than us on average. Are we? And incidentally, Americans had the highest life expectancy in the world when I was growing up. Today, we are an average of six years behind our European neighbors. Are we lazier and more suicidal than Italians? Or is there a problem with our system? Are there problems with our incentives? Are there problems with our food?”

Kennedy criticized the Affordable Care Act, often referred to as Obamacare. “Obamacare actually incentivizes insurance companies to raise premiums to get 15% of a larger pie,” he said. “This is why premiums have increased 100% since the passage of Obamacare, making health care the largest driver of inflation while American life expectancy plummets.”

Covid Crisis Cannot Be Solved by Pharmaceuticals

Kennedy also told the audience that while the U.S. had one of the worst Covid outcomes in the world in terms of patient mortality, the solution to this problem lies not in pharmaceuticals but in the diet and lifestyle of Americans compared to those elsewhere. 

“Our health leaders said that Covid was a pharmaceutical deficiency,” he explained. “This was a lie. We have the highest chronic disease rate on earth.” 

He enumerated the problems in the American system, saying that two thirds of adults in the U.S. suffer from chronic health issues. “Years ago, that number was 1%,” he said. “When my uncle was president, about 1% of the children in this country had a chronic disease. That number may be as high as 60% in America [today]. 74% of Americans are now overweight or obese, including 50% of our children. 120 years ago, when somebody was obese, they were sent to the circus.”

Kennedy presented an alarming statistic that 50% of American teens are obese. This compares to a Japanese childhood obesity rate of 3%. 

Our Children Are Being Abused 

Kennedy described the chronic disease epidemic among American children as a form of abuse of the country’s most vulnerable. Calling the country’s children the “most precious assets that we have in this country,” he asked, “How can we let this happen to them? How can we call ourselves a moral nation, the most exemplary democracy in the world if we are treating our children like this?”

Kennedy went on to describe how diseases that once only affected the old are now increasingly common among children. “About 18% of American teens now have fatty liver disease,” Kennedy stated. “When I was a boy, this only affected late stage alcoholics who were elderly. Cancer rates are skyrocketing in the young and old. Young adult cancers are up 79% and 1 in 4 American women is on antidepressant medication. 40% of teens have a mental health diagnosis. 15% of high high schoolers are on Adderall…No other country has anything like this.”

Kennedy pointed to ultra-processed foods as the primary culprit in the medical crisis impacting the young. “70% of American children's diet is now ultra processed,” he said, “which means industrial manufactured in a factory.”

He went on to explain that following tighter regulations of the tobacco industry, many scientists who worked for cigarette manufacturers started working for corporations that manufacture processed foods subsequent to the acquisition of industrial food processors by tobacco firms. 

These foods, Kennedy explained, are stuffed with chemicals that did not exist a century ago. Many such chemicals are banned from human consumption in Europe. However, “They are ubiquitous in American processed foods,” noted Kennedy. “We are literally poisoning our children systematically for profit.” 

Kennedy identified a second culprit – “toxic chemicals in our food, our medicine and our environment. Pesticides, food additives, pharmaceutical drugs and toxic waste permeate every cell in our bodies. This assault on our children's cells and hormones is unrelenting.”

Lower Fertility and Hormonal Dysfunction 

Kennedy said that the presence of unhealthy amounts of the hormone estrogen in the environment, medicine and food have caused a steep drop in fertility rates. Compared to recent generations, young men in 2024 have a reduced sperm count by a factor of 50%. Among girls, the onset of puberty now occurs six years earlier than it did at the turn of the 20th century. 

The problem, Kennedy noted, is not only on the shelves of grocery stores and bodegas but in schools and the country’s welfare programs. “We are mass poisoning all of our children and all of our doctors and industry lobbyists made sure of that,” he said. “About 70% of foods that are in the school lunch program and about 70% of food [purchased with] stamps are processed food.”

Solutions 

Kennedy clearly stated that until pharmaceutical companies, doctors, medical products manufactures, government and regulatory bodies are decoupled from the phenomenon of corporate capture, little will change. But simple and cost effective solutions are not only beneficial but possible.

For Kennedy, one solution begins with ending the corrupting influence of corporate capture of regulatory bodies and of elected officials. He added, “The FDA, USDA and CDC are all controlled by giant or private corporations. Their function is no longer to improve and protect the health of Americans. Their function is to advance the mercantile and commercial interests of the pharmaceutical industry that has transformed them and the food industry that has transformed them into sock puppets.”

Kennedy lambasted the government for subsidizing the purchase of the weight loss medication Ozempic, which is made by Danish company, Novo Nordisk. Instead of allowing foreign subsidies on drugs, Kennedy suggested that American money could be used to “purchase regenerative, fully raised organic agriculture or organic food for every American - three meals a day and gym membership for every obese American.” This, he argued, is one solution to obesity and related chronic health diseases recommended by the government of Denmark. 

Kennedy said that while subsiding Ozempic doses for obese Americans would cost $3 trillion per year, the cost of providing access to fresh foods and gym memberships to unhealthy and chronically obese Americans would be less than half of Ozempic’s price tag. 

Kennedy told his audience that for the past 19 years he has prayed to God every morning, hoping that America’s health crisis can be solved for the benefit of the next generation. “I believe we have the opportunity for transformational bipartisan change, to transform American health, recharge our human capital, to improve our budget, and I believe to save our spirits and our country," Kennedy concluded.