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My "Beef" with Bobby: On the Trouble With RFK Jr.
If Kennedy really wants to “Make America Healthy Again,” he could instead start by addressing the dangers of red and processed meats, a concern grounded in science.
Jan 28, 2025
Trump’s nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has triggered controversy. Many have rightly criticized his ongoing anti-vaccine messaging. He’s also erroneously claimed that antidepressants were linked to school shootings, among other falsities.
Despite this all, his confirmation seems likely. So, let us prepare.
Kennedy promises to take on ultra-processed foods. He has alerted Americans that their over-consumption is linked to multiple maladies, from diabetes to heart disease. He also advocates banning them from school lunches.
On this, I say, “Right on, Bobby!”
The American diet poses great risks, including its heavy reliance on ultra-processed foods. They are one reason for our shockingly low international health and health-system ranking—way down at 69th. Unfortunately, RFK’s tendency to mislead carries over to this issue. It’s already clear that his campaign against ultra-processed food is not evidence-based. For example, he falsely claims seed oils (sunflower and canola) are harmful.
If confirmed, RFK Jr. will oversee the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), giving him power to regulate our food industry as well as a much-broader mandate: “to safeguard the food supply.”
If Kennedy really wants to “Make America Healthy Again,” he could instead start by addressing the dangers of red and processed meats, a concern grounded in science. The World Health Organization identifies red meat as a probable carcinogen and processed meat a carcinogen. Likewise, a meta-analysis of 148 studies reveals that red meat—especially processed meat—contributes to higher risks for a range of cancers.
Crucially, today’s definition of “food-borne illnesses” contains a serious oversight: the deadly diseases linked to red meat and processed meats. We have a right to be outraged that the FDA still fails to require warning labels or otherwise alert the public to this serious harm. The recently proposed front-of-package labels for saturated fats, sodium, and sugar would be a first step, but we cannot stop there.
Perhaps most troubling, the agency has enabled ultra-processed meats—hot dogs or bologna—to be fed to our children at our schools. Loose guidelines also allow mega-food corporations like Kraft Heinz to introduce ultra-processed products like Lunchables in school cafeterias. Sadly, for many children, school meals are their main source of nutrition. We need to do better by them.
This crisis also reflects the political power of the meat industry. Therefore, RFK Jr. must stand up to this pernicious interest group, which “spent more than $10 million on political contributions and lobbying efforts in 2023,” which for some, “was an all-time high,” reports the Missouri Independent.
Over more than 50 years, a number of my books, starting with Diet for a Small Planet, have focused on the needless waste, ecological destruction, and hunger built into our grain-fed-meat-centered diets—all driven by the highly concentrated power of corporate agribusiness. I have stressed the health benefits of plant-based diets.
The great news is that diets rich in whole grains, legumes, fish, fruits, vegetables, and nuts—with little or no red and processed meats, sugar-sweetened beverages, and refined grains—can lengthen our lives. A much-cited 2001 National Institute of Health study predicted that avoiding meat contributes to lifestyles that could add ten years to one’s life. Even if one began this healthier diet as late as age 60, life-expectancy increases over eight years for women and almost nine years for men.
To enable access to wholesome diets, Kennedy must also do his part to tackle the growing crisis of “food deserts”—low-income, urban areas where at least a third of residents live a mile or more from a supermarket. This barrier to healthy diets affects over 40 millions of us. The HHS will oversee the 2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which inform key programs such as SNAP and the National School Lunch Program. Here, we must urge RFK Jr. to focus on the science: processed meats are dangerous.
In all this, we must remain vigilant in holding Kennedy and the broader Trump administration accountable. We must also work for political reforms to ensure our elected officials are no longer corrupted by private interests. Our fight to protect our community’s health goes hand-in-hand with our fight for democracy.
Every bite we eat is a choice for the world we want. So, let’s push the incoming head of the HHS to ensure that all Americans are able to take healthy, wholesome bites.
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The Biden Administration Is Pulling Drug Prices Down Out of the Stratosphere
The president’s Inflation Reduction Act contained several provisions affecting drug prices, including three that began to take effect in 2023.
Apr 03, 2024
Prices for prescription drugs in America average almost three times as much as in other major nations around the world. Even more, the companies that set those prices are doing everything they can to make sure they stay in the stratosphere: They’ve filed suit to overturn an upcoming reform, having Medicare negotiate the prices of some of the costliest and most commonly used drugs.
The makers don’t think they need to explain themselves, either. If they hadn’t been threatened with subpoenas, their CEOs would never have showed up to waffle their way through a Senate hearing on drug pricing earlier this year.
Lastly, the companies argue that critics of high prices should instead be praising the industry for all the research it carries out to make the drugs available in the first place—failing to mention, of course, the critical role that government funding regularly plays in the development of new drugs.
If you wonder how patients could be harmed by lower drug prices, feel free to ask the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.
A big contributor to insane drug prices is the billions spent on those incessant drug commercials. Hour after hour, eyes glazing over, TV watchers are bombarded with happy-time ads for Rinvoq, Skyrizi, Dupixent, Sanofi, Jardiance, on and on and then some.
Thank heaven for mute buttons; more to the point, thank heaven that the Biden administration is leading the way to somewhat less insanity.
The president’s Inflation Reduction Act contained several provisions affecting drug prices, including three that began to take effect in 2023. The bill capped the price of insulin at $35 a month, made some vaccines free, and required drug companies that raised prices faster than the rate of inflation to pay rebates to Medicare.
Here’s President Joe Biden taking a victory lap during his State of the Union address: “That’s not just saving seniors money, it’s saving taxpayers money. We cut the federal deficit by $160 billion because Medicare will no longer have to pay those exorbitant prices…”
Other cost-saving provisions are coming as well. Starting in 2025, out-of-pocket prescription drug costs for retirees covered under Medicare Part D will be capped at $2,000. Annual limits after 2025 will be adjusted based on inflation rates.
Medicare-negotiated drug prices, mentioned earlier, have an effective date of 2026 (unless, of course, they get derailed by Big Pharma). Negotiations between Medicare and the makers are already underway for the first 10 covered drugs; all by themselves, those 10 accounted for over $3.4 billion in out-of-pocket costs in 2022.
Drug prices could fall even more sharply under the terms of the proposed 2025 budget for the Department of Health and Human Services. Instead of Medicare-negotiated prices for 10 drugs, the number would rise to 50 per year.
Presidents also have the power to make things happen without congressional legislation, and a Biden executive order could result in allowing states to import lower-cost drugs in bulk from Canada. The Food and Drug Administration approved Florida’s request early this year, and other states are hoping to follow. (Full disclosure: Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and former President Donald Trump also pushed for FDA’s approval.)
Drug companies reflexively oppose lower drug prices, so of course they reflexively oppose imports from Canada. A statement from their trade association said they were “considering all options for preventing this policy from harming patients.”
If you wonder how patients could be harmed by lower drug prices, feel free to ask the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. Another question too: Ask if they could please, please, please cut down on those commercials (or better yet, just end them).
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Abortion Defenders Decry 'Baseless' Attack on Mifepristone as SCOTUS Hears Case
"The overturn of Roe was just the first step in the far right's relentless campaign to restrict women's reproductive freedom," said one advocate. "We always knew they would come for medication abortion, too."
Mar 26, 2024
As the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments Tuesday in a case brought by right-wing activists seeking to sharply limit access to a commonly used abortion pill, reproductive rights advocates renewed warnings that Republicans' endgame isn't just making abortion a states' rights issue, but rather forcing a nationwide ban on all forms of the medical procedure.
Thehigh court justices—including six conservatives, half of them appointed by former President Donald Trump, the presumptive 2024 GOP presidential nominee—are hearing oral arguments in Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, a case brought by the right-wing Alliance Defending Freedom on behalf of anti-abortion doctors. The case involves the abortion pill known by the generic name mifepristone, which was first approved by the FDA in 2000 as part of a two-drug protocol to terminate early-stage pregnancies.
"If the Supreme Court refuses to follow the evidence and imposes medically unnecessary restrictions on mifepristone, it will be just another stepping stone in the anti-abortion movement's end goal of a nationwide ban on abortion."
"Mifepristone has been used by millions of women over the last 20 years, and its safety and effectiveness have been well-documented," said Jamila Taylor, president and CEO of the Institute for Women's Policy Research. "The drug has taken on even greater importance for women's health since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and the far right has moved to block women's access to healthcare at every turn."
In a dubious practice known as "judge shopping," the plaintiffs filed their complaint in Amarillo, Texas, where Matthew Kacsmaryk, the sole federal district judge and a Trump appointee, ruled last April that the FDA's approval of mifepristone was illegal. Shortly after Kacsmaryk's ruling, a federal judge in Washington state issued a contradictory decision that blocked the FDA from removing mifepristone from the market. The U.S. Department of Justice subsequently appealed Kacsmaryk's ruling.
Later in April 2023, the Supreme Court issued a temporary order that allowed mifepristone to remain widely available while legal challenges continued. A three-judge panel of the right-wing 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last August that the FDA's 2016 move to allow mifepristone to be taken later in pregnancy, mailed directly to patients, and prescribed by healthcare professionals other than doctors, was likely illegal. However, the court also allowed the pill to remain on the market pending the outcome of litigation.
In an analysis of the case published Tuesday, jurist Amy Howe explained:
There are three separate questions before the justices on Tuesday. The first one is whether the challengers have a legal right to sue, known as standing, at all. The FDA maintains that they do not, because the individual doctors do not prescribe mifepristone and are not obligated to do anything as a result of the FDA's decision to allow other doctors to prescribe the drug.
The court of appeals held that the medical groups have standing because of the prospect that one of the groups' members might have to treat women who had been prescribed mifepristone and then suffered complications—which, the FDA stresses, are "exceedingly rare"—requiring emergency care. But the correct test, the FDA and [mifepristone maker] Danco maintain, is not whether the groups' members will suffer a possible injury, but an imminent injury.
Destiny Lopez, acting co-CEO of the Guttmacher Institute, called the plaintiffs' claims "baseless."
"If the Supreme Court refuses to follow the evidence and imposes medically unnecessary restrictions on mifepristone, it will be just another stepping stone in the anti-abortion movement's end goal of a nationwide ban on abortion," she said on Tuesday. "As the court weighs its decision, let's be clear that the only outcome that respects facts and science is maintaining full access to mifepristone."
As more than 20 states have banned or restricted abortion since the Supreme Court's June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization ruling overturnedRoe v. Wade and voided half a century of federal abortion rights, people have increasingly turned to medication abortion to terminate unwanted pregnancies. And while Republicans have often claimed that overturning Roe was not meant to ban all abortions but merely to leave the issue up to the states, GOP-authored forced pregnancy bills and statements by Republican lawmakers and candidates including Trump—who last week endorsed a 15-week national ban—belie conservatives' goal of nationwide prohibition.
Project 2025, a coalition of more than 100 right-wing groups including Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America and other anti-abortion organizations, wants to require the FDA to ban drugs used for medication abortions, protect employers who refuse to include contraceptive coverage in insurance plans, and increase surveillance of abortion and maternal mortality reporting. The coalition is reportedly drafting executive orders through which Trump, if reelected, could roll back Biden administration policies aimed at protecting and expanding abortion access.
"The overturn of Roe was just the first step in the far right's relentless campaign to restrict women's reproductive freedom. We always knew they would come for medication abortion, too," Taylor said. "But conservatives seeking to block access to mifepristone are not concerned about women's safety; they want to block all abortion options for women and prevent them from making their own reproductive decisions, even in their own homes."
Right-wing groups including the Heritage Foundation have been pressing Trump to invoke the Comstock laws, a series of anti-obscenity statutes passed in 1873 during the Ulysses S. Grant administration. One of the laws outlawed using the U.S. Postal Service to send contraceptives and punished offenders with up to five years' hard labor. Named after Victorian-era anti-vice crusader and U.S. postal inspector Anthony Comstock, the laws were condemned by progressives of the day, with one syndicated newspaper editorial accusing Comstock of striking "a dastard's blow at liberty and law in the United States."
Slate senior writer Mark Joseph Stern said Tuesday that far-right Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito—who wrote the majority opinion in Dobbs—"are clearly eager to revive the Comstock Act as a nationwide ban on medication abortion, and maybe procedural abortion, too."
"That would subject abortion providers in all 50 states to prosecution and imprisonment," he added. "No congressional action needed."
Progressive U.S. lawmakers joined reproductive rights advocates in rallying outside the Supreme Court on Tuesday.
"Mifepristone is safe and effective and has been used in our country for decades," said Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.). "These far-right justices need to stop legislating from the bench."
Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) asserted that "medication abortion is safe, effective, and routine healthcare."
"Over half of U.S. abortions are done this way and we have decades of scientific evidence to back up its safety," she added. "SCOTUS must protect access to mifepristone and we must affirm abortion care as the human right that it is."
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