It’s About Time. Cheaper Fat Shots, and More!

My reader may remember that I’ve been critical of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement, led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. I like the intent. Still, their movement, heretofore, has been focused on demonizing ingredients and additives rather than on what we really need —a long-term plan to teach people what and how to eat, starting early.

My reader may also remember that for nearly 30 years, I’ve been working in and with the food industry, especially on scientific, regulatory, and technical issues, as well as nutrition standards. While correlation isn’t causation, we can track America’s health crises - obesity and overweight, bad diets and their consequences, including debilitating diabetes, shorter lifespans, and even hypertension and bone and joint issues - to the day when the federal government, during the Jimmy Carter Administration, decided to establish “Dietary Guidelines.” The list is long.

Heart disease, diabetes, obesity and other diet-related illnesses kill 7 out of 10 Americans and consume nearly 90% of a healthcare budget that’s more than $4 trillion a year. Unlike Covid, this epidemic has been accumulating over decades, hollowing out the health of our people year after year.

Robert F. Kennedy, Wall Street Journal, August 27

I somehow missed it, even as a Wall Street Journal subscriber and reader, but on August 27th, Secretary Kennedy published an op-ed calling on medical schools to step up their teaching of nutrition. As he confirmed in his op-ed, “Three-fourths of U.S. medical schools have no required clinical nutrition classes, and only 14% of residency programs have a required nutrition curriculum.”

The original Food Pyramid (nutrition). (2023, January 19). In Wikipedia.

en.wikipedia.org

Open link

It’s been replaced by “My Plate,” a better but still ineffectual Obama Administration initiative. Who the hell eats 11 servings a day of bread, cereal, rice, and pasta, DAILY?

As with most government programs, establishing “Dietary Guidelines” sounded good at the time. After all, heart disease was on the rise, which was, at the time, attributed to saturated fats in food (we now know that’s not entirely true). We were told to eat less red meat. Eggs were demonized for their high dietary cholesterol. In 1984, a federal government study told us so.

A public campaign led by Phil Sokolof in the late 1970s prompted companies like McDonald’s to replace beef tallow (fat) with now-infamous seed oils, lower in saturated fat. I wrote this about a year ago:

Sokolof started the National Heart Savers Association (with a staff of three, including himself) and wrote a book, “Add Years to Your Life.” In 1990, after a massive public campaign and considerable media and political pressure, McDonald’s and other quick-serve restaurants caved and switched from beef tallow, high in saturated fat, to vegetable oils. McDonald’s has been refining its cooking formula ever since, most recently eliminating artificial, partially-hydrogenated trans fats, which have proven even less healthy than saturated fat and are mostly now out of the food supply.

Thanks to pressure from Kennedy and Donald Trump, that famous one-time French fry server, the clock is being turned back. I would tell Mr. Sokolof to call his office, but he died in 2004 at the age of 82.

That isn’t all, of course. Kennedy is now successfully pressuring most companies to agree to remove certain artificial food colors that have been associated with hyperactivity and other maladies in some children. The fact is that food makers have been working feverishly - if, for Kennedy, too slowly - to find or develop affordable natural alternatives for a long time. Pressure from Kennedy and others in the Trump Administration tush-pushed it.

Profit margins in the food industry are slim, so costs matter.

It begs a question. Why add colors to food in the first place? Because consumers reward food makers for brightly colored snack foods, like Skittles, made by Mars, the privately owned Virginia behemoth. It is not easy to find brightly colored candy and snack products in Europe and elsewhere. Suffice to say that if consumers didn’t want it, food makers wouldn’t make and market it. I remember when H.J. Heinz Company, the Pittsburgh-based maker of the famous ketchup, started marketing green and even purple ketchup to increase sales of its commodity. It worked for a while, and my young boys enjoyed them, but you don’t see them on shelves anymore.

Consumers mostly have only themselves to blame for their choices, but “blaming consumers” gets you in trouble with so-called “consumer advocates” and is not a winning message for policymakers and regulators.

But the truth is that blaming “big food” is too easy, overly simplistic, and wildly ineffective. They’re really good at making tasty foods that are convenient and affordable. Not everyone can afford to shop at local farmers’ markets, Whole Foods, or Trader Joe’s, which sells its share of those evil “ultra-processed” foods - the latest demon (which includes many Greek yogurts). My neighbors here in rural western Loudoun County, Virginia, sell “farm to market” organic eggs for about $6 per dozen, but I can buy eggs for half that at the local Harris Teeter (owned by Kroger) grocery store.

Dr. Michael Jacobson, founder and former CEO of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), has long pressured companies to market healthy foods like junk food. Companies like “baby carrot” pioneer Bolthouse Farms, a major producer of packaged carrots, salad dressings, and healthy beverages, did exactly that about a dozen years ago under the leadership of Jeff Dunn, a former Coca-Cola executive. Campbell Soup Company (now “Campbell’s Company”) bought the company and backed the marketing strategy.

It worked for a while, just like green and purple ketchup.

A few years later, they sold it back to Dunn and the colleagues they had bought it from at a huge discount - and a huge loss (Bolthouse is doing well on its own). The sanctimonious Dr. Jacobson may be an expert on nutrition, but he never knew squat about marketing or changing consumer preferences. His, his successors’, and his allies’ efforts to change them haven’t worked well. That’s because they’re more about demonizing food makers than educating consumers. It raises more money.

Also, concerns over heart disease have abated as other chronic conditions related to obesity have grown exponentially. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation and others, obesity rates in the US are among the highest in the world, and reached 42 percent before beginning to abate recently.

We have another “demon” to thank for that—big pharma. Specifically, drugs that go by the names of Wegovy, Ozempic, Monjouro, Zepbound, and their generic equivalents. It seems that between 10 percent (men) and 15 percent (women) of Americans are taking the drug with great effect.

[Disclosure: I’m one of them. I lost over 50 pounds on a Tirzepatide (Zepbound) compound, thanks to a Physician’s Assistant at a local wellness center. I tried to lose weight the old-fashioned way, which I’d done twice before, but it gets very hard after age 60. I’m a believer. And the benefits go well beyond weight loss, it seems, even as we have much more to learn. But do consult a medical professional before beginning this journey. They don’t work for everyone, and there are side effects. In my case, the side effects were practically nonexistent.]

In case you didn't know, the drugs were developed to help people with diabetes, to help lower their A-1 scores (blood sugar, basically). They slow your digestion, making you feel fuller, faster. You eat less without the hunger pains. I’m not diabetic, but it runs in my family. I don’t have insurance coverage (yet), but I don’t care. I’m blessed with the resources, and I’ve never felt better. Just be sure to get plenty of exercise and eat plenty of protein and fiber.

I don’t care that I may have to take the drug for the rest of my life, so long as I can afford it and it continues to work without adverse consequences. Many Americans are already on a path to lifelong drug treatment to treat other chronic diseases like hypertension (high blood pressure). And thanks to the week’s big announcement from the Trump Administration for many Medicare and other users, the cost is about to plummet. Kennedy had previously expressed opposition to the medicine, but was on hand for this week’s big announcement that the drug makers would lower prices through “TrumpRx” and for specific Medicare recipients.

He knows that reducing obesity rates is key to lowering health care costs.

Better yet, Eli Lilly, the Indianapolis drug maker, has figured out a way to convert the drug from requiring an insulin-like injection and refrigeration to a shelf-stable pill that is likely to be approved by the FDA in 2026. From the White House fact sheet on the game-changing announcement:

• The agreement represents a historic reduction in prices for Americans on the two drugs with the highest annual expenditures in the United States, both of which help adults struggling with diabetes, heart disease (Ozempic and Wegovy only), obesity, and other conditions.
  • The prices of Ozempic and Wegovy will fall from $1,000 and $1,350 per month, respectively, to $350 when purchased through TrumpRx.
  • The price of Zepbound and Orforglipron, if approved, will fall from $1,086 per month to an average of $346 when purchased through TrumpRx.
  • If the FDA later approves the Wegovy pill, or certain similar “GLP-1” drugs in each company’s pipeline intended to be taken orally rather than as a shot, the initial dose of those drugs will be priced at $150 per month through TrumpRx.

But back to nutrition: Kennedy deserves praise for pressuring medical schools to up their nutrition education for future doctors, but that’s just the beginning. He needs to work with the Department of Education Secretary Linda McMahon and her colleagues in every state to require nutrition education in public schools, starting as early as possible.

About 15 years ago, my company and I worked with a terrific pilot project involving inner-city schools in Kansas City, Missouri, alongside two excellent nutrition professionals with a physical education organization. We installed workout equipment in an empty classroom, required students to use it for an hour per day, and had nutrition educators on hand to explain how their time exercising equated to the calories in a banana or even an ice cream treat. In other words, calories in, calories out.

The benefits were excellent. Not only did students become more fit and BMI (Body Mass Index) scores drop, but so did truancy rates. Grades and test scores went up. It caught the attention of visiting military recruiters, who reject the vast majority of recruits over weight and related health issues.

And then Kansas City closed the schools.

Worse, the food industry stupidly replaced the program with a less effective “Discovery Education” program that distributed materials in schools but did nothing to reduce obesity rates, unlike our Kansas City program. I wrote about the whole thing in detail here over two years ago.

The Kansas City program wasn’t perfect. Installing exercise equipment in schools isn’t cheap, nor is hiring nutrition educators to teach kids the costs and benefits of burning calories. But having obese kids, teenagers, and parents is way more costly, especially if you need a fit Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, and Space Force.

Kennedy and his team would do well to learn from those Kansas City schools and the food industry’s utter failure to support the right approach. We need to better integrate nutrition education with physical activity in schools at all levels, starting as soon as possible, and teaching people to prize their health over taste and convenience.

It can be done. Kennedy is now off to a good start with medical schools. He should take the next steps. After all, Communist Chinese schools have figured it out.