Yves here. KLG probes what MAHA seems to mean in the public’s mind and in practice, and starts with a key text: Good Energy by Casey Means. Sadly, it’s a document only for the American affluenza, with its food recommendations, like organic eggs and dairy products from grass fed cows, are budget-breakers for many (and for the most part not or barely available outside the US/UK/European arena; dream of finding much in the way of organic food or products here beyond produce at stores that cater to farangs).
KLG’s intro:
The reboot of MAGA begins next week. This time around, in addition to Making America Great Again, the incoming Administration wants to Make America Healthy Again (MAHA). This is actually doable, as has been outlined in the best selling book Good Energy (2024) by MAHA influencer Casey Means MD, who is a graduate of Stanford University School of Medicine and a health entrepreneur. She has described the foundation of MAHA. The question is whether MAHA can follow through on its promise by doing what must be done, without fear of favor.
By KLG, who has held research and academic positions in three US medical schools since 1995 and is currently Professor of Biochemistry and Associate Dean. He has performed and directed research on protein structure, function, and evolution; cell adhesion and motility; the mechanism of viral fusion proteins; and assembly of the vertebrate heart. He has served on national review panels of both public and private funding agencies, and his research and that of his students has been funded by the American Heart Association, American Cancer Society, and National Institutes of Health
As a society we have come to live by tropes instead of truths [1], probably because the former give us some small comfort in our political puerility. In the United States, various actors from one wing of the Uniparty have been “fighting for” Our Democracy™ for a long time, despite the clear oligarchical nature of US politics that antedates recent hysteria. Thus, Our Democracy™ is little more than a trope. MAGA – Make America Great Again – is another trope, viewed as a rallying cry by some, with shudders by others, and with a shrug by perhaps the plurality. MAGA depends on the meaning of “Great,” but the blasphemous meme that has long predated current usage of the term comes to mind: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I shall fear no evil, for I am the meanest son-of-a-bitch in the valley.” [2]
MAGA was the motivating trope of Trump I and will likely be the same for Trump II, depending on the continuing influence of certain American oligarchs, which will be disputed by others in the Republican political space. Another potential trope, Make America Healthy Again (MAHA), has recently emerged for Trump II. MAHA follows naturally from MAGA, but what does it really mean?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Services designee in the incoming Administration, has been linked to MAHA from the beginning. It is difficult to understand what RFKJr brings to this. While he talks about our “poisonous” food, he seldom goes beneath the surface of why this may be true. His views on the science of health, particularly the safety and utility of vaccines, remain under discussion. On the other hand, Casey Means MD, who recently published Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health (2024), may become a leading influencer in the MAHA movement. Her background and her book make for an interesting study, although few people would be surprised at the “connection between metabolism and health.” And “limitless” does not and cannot apply to health outside the realm of marketing.
Casey Means is a graduate of Stanford University, where she earned her undergraduate degree and MD. After graduation from medical school, she began her ENT residency at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland. But near the end of that 5-year residency, she quit because, as she explains, she realized that she was treating the symptoms instead of the causes of disease:
Despite surgically treating inflamed tissues of the head and neck day in and day out, not once – ever – was I taught the causes of inflammation…or about its connection to inflammatory chronic diseases so many Americans are facing…My gut told me all of Sophia’s conditions could be related, but instead of tapping into that curiosity, I always stayed in the lane of my specialty, followed the guidelines, and reached for my prescription pad and scalpel…Soon after my encounter with Sophia, I felt an overwhelming conviction that I couldn’t cut into another patient until I figured out why – despite the monumental size and scope of our health care system – the patients and people around me were sick in the first place. [3]
Her frustration is understandable. As she notes, the American healthcare system is “the largest and fastest growing industry in the United States…locked into a reductionist, fragmented view of the body that breaks us into dozens of separate parts.” And it is no accident that these parts are most profitably treated as separate entities by the “industry.” There is nothing new here, but these facts are seldom recognized so explicitly by an erstwhile insider. Casey Means MD abandoned her ENT career for Functional Medicine. Good Energy and the company Levels are two results of her career change. There is a lot to unpack here, beginning with a book that by nature I approached with some trepidation. Nevertheless, I was pleasantly surprised regarding the presentation of basic principles of energy metabolism and their relation to good health. If this relationship is properly understood and acted upon, MAHA can be much more than a trope. Despite the objections of the medical establishment, “Functional Medicine” that works is properly called “medicine.”
“Good Energy” is defined as metabolic health. Metabolism “refers to the set of cellular mechanisms that transform food into energy that can power every single cell in the body.” The book Good Energy comes in four parts. Parts 1 and 2 cover the basic science of metabolism and are quite good overall. In my experience, this is unusual in books of this genre. Part 3 explains to the reader how to maintain “Good Energy,” and Part 4 is a list of recipes. We will concentrate on Parts 1 and 2 here and include a few points from Part 3. The presentation, beginning at the level of the single cell where all energy metabolism occurs, is simple and straightforward but not simpleminded.
A recurring theme in Good Energy is that “bad energy,” which is the absence of enough energy to keep cells functioning properly, leads to chronic and systemic inflammation. This list is long for an ENT surgeon-in-preparation and includes sinusitis, otitis, tonsillitis, rhinitis, parotitis, and thyroiditis among more than 20 other conditions. As noted in Good Energy:
Chronic inflammation is a crucial instigator of all kinds of diseases outside of the ear, nose, and throat – from cancer [4] and cardiovascular disease to autoimmune diseases to respiratory infections to gastrointestinal conditions to skin disorders to neurological disorders. Yet it was not part of the institutional medical culture to focus on these connections nor to go deeper and ask why all that inflammation was there. (italics in original).
In this view of medical practice, managing the condition rather than healing the condition is the goal. This is a harsh indictment, but largely true in the broadest view, and more profitable for the healthcare system as a whole but not necessarily beneficial to the patient.
Casey Means MD explains well for the general reader how “good energy” at the subcellular level of the mitochondrion [5] is dysregulated by the common faults of our modern diet and way of life. This includes chronic overnutrition (we eat too much of the wrong food or food-like substances because industrial food scientists do their work so well), nutrient deficiencies (the food we eat is not as nutritious as in the past), microbiome dysbiosis (the food we eat changes our gut flora for the worse), sedentary lifestyle (a life without enough physical activity is unhealthy), chronic stress (the stress hormone cortisol affects glucose metabolism), medications and drugs (rampant polypharmacy of modern medicine has multiple consequences), sleep deprivation (unnatural schedules), environmental toxins and pollutants, artificial light and circadian disruption, and thermoneutrality (we seldom get cold or hot, both of which may give metabolism a workout). Each of these “modern afflictions” affect metabolism through known mechanisms, albeit some more well understood than others. Casey Means MD is particularly good on how blood sugar and insulin are affected by modern insults to energy metabolism. In summary, her “trifecta” leading to Bad Energy (i.e., lack of Good Energy) includes:
- Mitochondrial Dysfunction: Low energy production. For example, fat stored inside the wrong cells blocks normal cellular function, as in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), which is now diagnosed in children; this has appeared only recently.
- Chronic Inflammation: Mitochondrial function/low energy production are perceived as a threat by the body, which can then induce a systemic inflammatory response.
- Oxidative stress: Toxic reactive oxygen species released from dysfunctional mitochondria subsequently damage cell contents and cell membranes, leading to tissue and organ system dysfunction. [6]
Overall, this makes perfect sense.
Good Energy continues by listing the generally invisible clinical correlates of good health and explaining them in language accessible for everyone. [7] It is a marketing exaggeration to say that energy metabolism is the one determinant of good health. However, for chronic disease this is often true.
“Chapter 3: Trust Yourself, Not Your Doctor” is a typical trope of Alternative Medicine, of which Functional Medicine is a branch, but Casey Means MD makes a good case, in that she means “Trust the system on acute issues, ignore it on chronic.” This is difficult to dispute. As she puts it, “Every institution that impacts our health makes more money when you are sick and less when you are healthy – from hospitals to pharma to medical schools, and even insurance companies.” Or, from several distinct passages in Good Energy:
Life expectancy has increased because of sanitation practices and infectious disease mitigation measures; because of emergency surgery techniques for acute and life-threatening conditions, like an inflamed appendix or trauma; and because of antibiotics to reverse life-threatening infections. In short, almost every ‘health miracle’ we can point to is a cure for an acute issue (i.e., a problem that would kill you if left unresolved). Economically, acute conditions aren’t great in our modern system, because the patient is quickly cured and no longer a customer (instead of patient who no longer in need of care)…moreover…The medicalization of chronic disease in the past fifty years has been an abject failure…If you pull out deaths from the top eight infectious diseases…from historical data, life expectancy rates haven’t improved much in the past 120 years…(even though)…health care is the largest and fastest-growing industry in the United States – with the vast majority of health care dollars going to chronic disease care.
Good energy through eating well and living well is not the panacea for all disease, or the source of “limitless health.” But the usual alternative is to see a cardiologist for high cholesterol (note that cholesterol is no longer considered a nutrient of concern, which did not make the cover of Time magazine), an endocrinologist for metformin to treat incipient Type 2 diabetes caused by obesity, a sleep specialist for Ambien, a neurologist for Adderall to treat ADHD, a pain specialist for an opioid [7], a urologist for erectile dysfunction, an ENT for an antibiotic or surgery for a sinus infection. The list goes on, while the medical establishment remains largely silent on the things that are (mostly) making us sick, food and lifestyle.
“Food and lifestyle” borders on “tropish,” especially when you read the Alternative Medicine “literature,” usually in the form of hyperbolic websites, but that does not make it untrue. A few supporting observations include:
- 77% of 21-year-olds are not physically fit enough to join the military.
- 40% of funding for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics comes from Big Food.
- 10% of SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, derisively called Food Stamps in the past) funds are spent on sugar-sweetened beverages.
Again, these data are difficult to ignore. Something is very wrong here.
After the sound scientific foundation for good energy is laid out, Casey Means MD proceeds to the Six Principles of Good Energy Eating. This has been covered here previously from a complementary perspective. One of the most encouraging statements in Good Energy is that “Diet controversy is a charade.” This is true. All one must do to achieve good metabolic health and avoid most chronic disease is eat real food in moderation and remain active, sleep well, and eliminate unnecessary stress. Vegetarian, vegan, omnivore? This does not matter as long as the diet includes enough of every kind of macro- and micronutrient.
As an instruction manual, Good Energy is very good for those with the means and will to follow the directions. Nevertheless, this passage leapt off the page for me:
“You might be thinking, ‘Isn’t the cost of eating unrefined or minimally refined, sustainably sources foods too high for most people?’ Here’s a possibly uncomfortable truth: you will either pay for healthy food up front or you will pay for preventable medical issues and lost productivity in the future.” (italics in original)
If ever there was a message directed at a Professional Managerial Class (PMC) that buys books and sometimes reads them, this is it. “Pay,” “preventable,” and “productivity” fairly shout, to my ears.
Moving on along this path, in The Good Energy Baseline Quiz (p. 269) the questions for omnivores are:
- __ I avoid farm-raised fish and eat mostly wild-caught fish
- __ I avoid conventional meats and mostly eat organic pasture-raised grass-fed meats
- __ I avoid conventional eggs and mostly eat pasture-raised eggs
- __ I buy organic milk and cheese originating from pasture-raised cows
A member of the PMC, who probably has an income of some whole-number multiple of the local median family income and who is motivated to pay attention to diet and lifestyle, will have little trouble with these instructions. Not so much for everyone else. The problem with Good Energy is that responsibility for poor diet and unhealthy lifestyle (e.g., stress, lack of sleep, inhuman schedules, all of which are covered in Good Energy to good effect) is placed entirely on the individual. This is the recurring theme of the Neoliberal Dispensation. However, our chronic disease burden is overwhelmingly a problem of public health. The solution described here requires only personal initiative and responsibility, naturally for those who can pay. A more neoliberal approach, in which the market is the measure of all things, to Good Energy is difficult to imagine.
Which brings us to Levels, the company backed by “Leading Experts in Metabolic Health,” including Casey Means MD and Dr. Robert Lustig. [9] With Levels, for $199 per year (or $40 per month) a member gets an app to monitor metabolic health and healthy habits. Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) is an additional $184 per month. Thus, a year of CGM would be $2,208. [10] A lab visit is $99, but you can get two at a 10% discount of $178. This is fine as far as it goes. But “Yes, we have an app for that!” is not a scalable technical solution to chronic disease morbidity and mortality that is clearly sociogenic.
Currently about 70% of people in the US (population >340M) are overweight or obese. Levels has ~60,000 members according to the website. Casey Means MD has laid out very well the cellular-metabolic-systemic foundations of much of our chronic disease. Her explanation of the relevant science is good and she explains the foundations is accessible language. Her analysis also dovetails with the work of many others. Functional Medicine as practiced by Casey Means MD undoubtedly works for the patients she spends two hours with during their appointments in her private practice, and who have the means and will to follow her advice. But her solution is in no way generalizable to the greatest number of the population suffering from chronic diseases associated with dysregulated metabolism. There are no wild-caught fish, grass-fed ribeye steaks, free-range eggs, or bottles of organic milk in a food desert. On the other hand, food deserts are full of ultra-processed foods and sweetened drinks, cigarettes and beer, plus lottery tickets.
Will Harris of White Oak Pastures in Bluffton, Georgia, blurbed Good Energy. He is correct: “In Good Energy, Dr. Means makes a bold case for why food – and particularly regenerative agriculture – must be at the very center of health care. Dr. Means makes it clear that we can’t drug our way out of a broken food system.” Indeed, our broken “food system” is the problem, and Good Energy shows why throughout the book. Casey Means MD hits the nail squarely on the head with this: When ultra-processed breakfast cereal mass-marketed by Big Food gets the American Heart Association seal of approval as “heart healthy,” something has gone seriously wrong.
Thus, the only way for things to change at the scale required is for MAHA to take the lead in deconstructing the category mistake that is Industrial Agriculture – the unsustainable production of commodity crops for mass marketing of ultra-processed food-like substances and CAFO meat at great but necessarily temporary profit for the few – into the kind of agriculture practiced by Will Harris, and potentially many thousands of other farmers like him. A local and regional agriculture responsible to the people and for the land will be transformative. It is also essential for human flourishing and the health of the ecosphere as the Neoliberal Dispensation ends.
Yes, this is a very heavy lift. But unless MAHA is willing to go past “Yes, we have an app for that!” and take on Big Ag and Big Food with the public good as the primary focus, MAHA will remain nothing but a performative trope, albeit a trope with a solid scientific foundation. And we will all be the poorer for that in the end if MAHA fails.
Notes
Thanks to JLT for one of the links to RFKJr.
[1] From the Greek, tropos, “turn of phrase.” According to the New Shorter Oxford Dictionary: “A figure of speech consisting in the use of a word or phrase in a sense other than that which is proper to it.” It should be noted that there is certainly no one truth, but useful scientific-truth-in-context is real.
[2] I remember this being common through the 1970s. The movie Patton was released to great acclaim in 1970, but despite the sometimes over-the-top depiction of the title character by George C. Scott, there is no evidence General George S. Patton III ever said this.
[3] A Stanford classmate has disputed her description of the curriculum, but as a faculty member in a medical school this is not a big stretch to me. First principles, including nutrition, are not emphasized nearly enough in modern medical curriculum. “Sophia” was one of Dr. Means’s patients. The patient stories in Good Energy are well chosen anecdata to illustrate the business and the practice of modern American medicine. These also include Casey Means’s mother, who was diagnosed with late-stage pancreatic cancer and died only a few weeks later after rejecting, to the consternation of the high-level local medical establishment, heroic (and profitable) interventions that would not have changed the outcome by more than a few weeks while separating her from family in her final days during the pandemic.
[4] For example, esophageal cancer (five-year survival rate of ~20%) is usually downstream of chronic inflammation caused by heartburn (gastroesophageal reflux disease, GERD). Stomach cancer (similar five-year survival) can be a downstream consequence of inflammation caused by the ulcer-inducing bacterium Helicobacter pylori. Cardiovascular disease, which is the leading cause of death in the US is often accompanied by inflammation.
[5] For our purposes, the mitochondrion is simply the “powerhouse of the cell” we learned about in high school biology. Most human cells can get by for a while without optimum mitochondrial energy production. The importance of complete metabolism for normal function lies in the metabolic yield of ATP (the “energy currency” of the cell). One glucose molecule produces 2 ATPs in the absence of mitochondria. In marked contrast, the full mitochondrial yield is 30-32 ATPs per glucose molecule, depending on how the accounting is done (this has changed since I did the audit as a student). This 15- to 16-fold difference is the reason we are complex multicellular animals who can walk, talk, and think rather than single cells minding our own business while swimming in lakes, rivers, and oceans.
[6] Cells make tissues, tissues make organs, organs make organ systems, e.g., the gastrointestinal system from one end to the other.
[7] Plasma levels of triglycerides (fat), HDL (high-density lipoprotein – “good” cholesterol), fasting glucose; blood pressure, waist circumference; triglyceride/HDL ratio (as a measure of insulin sensitivity).
[8] A National Academy of Medicine (then called the Institute of Medicine) panel in 2011 on chronic pain had nineteen members. Nine of them had ties to opioid manufacturers. This reminds me that virtually every author of one of the most cited papers in the New England Journal of Medicine on the utility of statins in cardiovascular health had been paid, one way or another, by Big Pharma. The conflicts of interest are well beyond obvious.
[9] Dr. Robert Lustig of the University of California-San Francisco has been a leader of the medical establishment on the connection of diet/lifestyle, particularly the addition of sugar to ultra-processed food, to chronic disease.
[10] In the absence of symptoms of metabolic syndrome or another chronic condition (or being a world class athlete in training), a once yearly determination of fasting glucose level is enough. And that is reason enough for a yearly checkup. Silent prediabetes is much easier to treat than frank diabetes and its sequelae.
excellent, as usual, KLG.
what i’d like to see more of, out there on X, etc…is what the pasture guy is talking about…month or 2 ago when musk was calling for “real geniuses” to populate his DOGE(!)…i sent a message.
“sure. I’ll tackle organic/local/regenerative/sustainable ag policy…so long as we can put Big Ag Ceo’s in stocks and pillories…perhaps as a pay per view funding mechanism”.
realistically, of course, i’m too old and broken and set in my ways to do anything of the sort…but its been perfectly obvious to me for decades that Big Ag is the root of many evils.
i cannot legally sell an egg, save “on farm”.
i am effectively excluded from “The Market” by federal, state, local and corporate policy choices that i had zero say in formulating.
as my grandad would say, “there’s yer dern problem, right there”…usually while pointing the the perfectly obvious, but overlooked.
replace big ag with people like me, and it would go a long, long way to solving a great many of the problems laid out, here.
i’ll be butchering a large….and problematic…rooster today…prolly 14#,lol.
he’s been in one of the fattening cages for a month and a half, just sitting there eating scratch grain literally larded with bacon grease.
i expect to render a lot of schmaltz during the process.
the end result(dinner) will be worlds away, qualitatively, from any bird i can purchase….no hormones, no fillers, or water injected…no antibiotics pre-loaded…and aside from the last 1.5 months, he’s had a happy life…running around, eating bugs, and screwing every hen he could catch(hence “problematic”)…maybe 1/3 of the eggs ive hatched during his free range period were his progeny.
and yet…the only economic incentive for all this hillbilly activity is entirely autarkik: i dont hafta earn $30 that such a bird would likely cost in some proverbial and , to me, mythical organic free range outlet.
i’ll braise him slow in the big dutch oven…and eat on him for a week.
he’ll make many disparate meals.
we can do so much better, if we get serious about big time vermifuge of these giant corpse parasites.
Excellent comment! Those of us old hippies who got hip to the deal back in the day have been saying these things for decades and totally ignored because money trumps all values–it is the god we serve whether we bow down in the direction of Wall Street or not. In a deeply divided culture where the main thing we have in common is that love of money (or in my case just needing it to survive, not having a farm) and some Hollywood mythology; maybe there is little appetite for seeing ourselves as part of a real society made up of real communities because fragmentation is both the result and the goal of most people.
Whatever one thinks of Trump et al, it would be a huge public gain if the power of big pharma and big agri was substantially diminished. I just don’t hold much hope that will happen.
Thank you for this post which makes good common sense.
Several months ago I commented on RFK Jr’s ‘Organic Food for Everyone!’ plan which appears to be a pie-in-the-sky idea (with no pie) rather than an actual plan. I asked how this would work especially for poor people who lack transportation or space to prepare and store ‘Organic Food for Everyone!’? Delivery by Uber to every Nowheresville, USA every day or every week? Sure, easy peasy. Deliver me a unicorn first, Bobby. I want one and it sounds real pretty.
I didn’t mention at the time how would the US even find a supply of ‘Organic Food for Everyone!’ since our organic food supply is limited? Totally changing our agricultural practices and other means of food procurement will take a very, very long time. The whole idea would be incredibly complicated and expensive.
Even attempting to supply organic food at a school lunch level everywhere in the country will be very difficult. Trying to supply it across the country to everyone would be next to impossible. Is this not obvious?
It’s a nice idea that resonates with PMC types who have unlimited time and money to chase after every new diet and exercise craze, as well as transportation to all kinds of fancy grocery stores and endless farmer’s markets to pick up whatever they want. Why not ‘Brunch for Everyone!’ too while we are at it?
Honestly, this makes First Lady Food Scold Michelle Obama’s ‘Let’s Get Fat Poor Kids to Do Organic Gardening in Their Nonexistent Gardens’ idea seem plausible.
BTW, my monthly food stamp allotment was just cut because my Social Security went up a few dollars in January. Now I am already worse off trying to get food in 2025 than I was last year. Will RFK Jr fix this?
There is no fix as such but, rather, a slow evolution into a less toxic food environment by small steps. Economic incentives are what they are and when we begin to move away from the religion of money and worship of “winners” then change will happen even for the poor. I think people are moving in the direction we both would like but it will take decades, maybe even century, for it to evolve.
Poors can do dietary changes but only if they have real grocery stores. I know because I’ve done it and the results of getting processed food out of my diet have been absolutely remarkable.
It’s a boring diet but frankly, if you don’t cook with hot peppers all your meals are boring to me. I eat vegetables and meat as well as too many potatoes and too much rice. I have never felt better or healthier. For the last decade I have bizarrely felt younger as I got older and that’s entirely due to purging my diet of toxic substances.
My grocery bill is cheap. Skip the word ‘organic’ for now, unless you do due diligence on the company and everyone in that food chain, you’re paying extra without necessarily getting what you’re paying for. Some produce is flat out tainted, I’ve talked about celery and pesticides here before. Avoid big brands but mostly never cheat. Ignore everything in the last aisle and next to the cash register.
But mostly, commit to never cheating. Once you’re in the right dietary groove, your body will punish you for cheating in real time but first you have to stop with the cheat days and commit to doing a couple months of unprocessed food. Assuming you have a real grocery store, you will 1) save money, 2) feel better, 3) be noticeably healthier.
Not kidding about saving money. This is not the Trader Joe’s version of this diet, this is the version that simply requires a real grocery store, paying attention to what you eat, and never cheating. I’ve quit meth, tobacco and booze. Compared to quitting processed food those were easy but if someone with an addictive personality like mine can do it, so can you : )
Did you read the article? It appears not.
Casey Means goes well beyond recommending the elimination of processed foods. She depicts a healthy diet as hard core organic, one with no farmed fish, only organic meats, and for beef and dairy, organic + grass fed. That IS expensive. Go look at prices per pound at one vendor, US Wellness Meats: https://grasslandbeef.com/ >$13 a pound for 85% lean ground beef, for instance. More than twice what I understand are typical retail prices for “normal” ground beef.
But it is good to have your attestation that simply eliminating processed foods has such clear benefits.
Mark, do you have a car? Do you work full time while also caring for children and/or elderly family members? Are you physically disabled? Do you lack food storage and preparation space? Do you have a working refrigerator and stove/oven? Do you have pots and pans and other utensils? ‘Poors’ have a lot of problems to deal with that you don’t address.
Historically, 40 to 60% of our food was produced in cities. Today, in most north American cities that is what, 1%? Historically, the milk people drank, came from a cow down the street. How many miles does milk travel today?
A simple way to do get better quality food would be to bring our food production back to the local level. This would require most of our regulations, and zoning to be scrapped, but it is possible. Chickens and goats could be mowing the grass instead of lawn mowers, all the compost collected could be animal food. We could be pasturing cows along freeways instead of mowing the grass. Goats could be used to clear brush instead of fires. Best of all the manure would make great fertilizer for vegetable gardens.
Yes, all that is true but the System operates on money (not markets which are fixed and controlled by the Big Agra concerns) not the well-being of citizens other than the PMC and above the top income classes will prosper and the rest of us can just pound sand.
A three step plan to improve health by government action in the US:
1) Government financed healthcare for all. There are quite a lot of thing medical sciences can help with (including quite a lot of cronic conditions). This is also a straight up money saver with how expensive the US health care system is.
2) Government provided low cost housing and rent control. Homelessness is very bad for health, stress over going homeless is also bad for health. Homelessness is also expensive on a society level.
3) Full employment policies for a decent wage. Unemployment and stress over getting the next paycheck is bad for health. Labour is the source of prosperity. By making sure everybody who wants a job has a job government can ensure that people need not go unemployed, that the labour they can provide is used in society and ensure a floor for wages.
1 has been done in many variations around the world and 2 and 3 were governement policy during the post-war era. So all of them can be done. I don’t expect any of them to be done because it would not benefit billionaires.
Formatting is skewiff.
Looks like what should have been a close blockquote tag was missing its ‘/” after (italics in original).
I believe RFK will try and do what most of us call the “right-thing” but the degree he can succeed (even to a mild degree) depends on our social mores changing. The best thing about his elevation in influence is that he has a kind of bully-pulpit as far as health and nutrition is concerned. With the evolving alt-media and the devolving (one hopes will continue) of the corporate media there is a chance major changes can occur eventually. Congress will always worship the money but we don’t have to–eventually cultural changes will influence Congress.
Thank you for this interesting article. Let’s start an action plan: 1) Part of big Ag’s success is in the ease of marketing. The farmer harvests corn, soybeans, or wheat, drives it to the buyer, gets it weighed and moisture content measured, and the buyer writes the farmer a check then and there. Truck farmers have to guess the market months in advance, then seek a buyer, harvest and deliver, a much more arduous process. 2) Old timers will remember “government cheese” and powdered milk, where food itself was delivered the poors instead of SNAP cards. Perhaps “government vegetables” could become a thing. Food banks and farmers markets could get together. 3)There’s a demographic problem for small farmers, the current crew is aging out. Young people wishing to farm have difficulty getting land. The next farm bill could favor mom and pop instead of Big Ag. We could reverse Earl Butz’s dictum, and get small or get out. Of course Big Ag will lobby like AIPAC to prevent it, but it’s worth a try. 4)Subsidies are distorting the market. Years ago I found California potatoes for sale in Aristook County, Maine. All states are farm states. Because we’re running out of diesel, in a hundred years we’re not going to be able to farm as large as we have been, or transport the food as far as we have been. We need to start localizing now.