JV Last the Bulwark makes an important point that has been driving me nuts too:
Our new health establishment is explicit about wanting to go backwards. It’s right there on the hat: Make America Healthy Again.
Again.
Meaning: America used to be “healthy” and now is not.
I’m sorry, I know we’re supposed to meet people where they are and give them a loving truth sandwich, but this is the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.
Does anyone remember what “health” looked like in America a generation or two ago? Half the country smoked. People dropped dead at 50 on the reg. Child birth was dangerous. Seatbelts were suss. Drug use was off the charts.
Dangerous communicable diseases were still around. Cancer was a death sentence. AIDS looked like an unstoppable tsunami.
Food? Do remember what grocery stores looked like in 1980? Aisles of canned vegetables, processed foods, and frozen TV dinners. Fresh produce? Good luck. That section of the Acme was a shoebox.
He goes on to list one disease and health condition after another that has been eradicated or massively reduced in just the last half century. Cancer alone has changed from an automatic death sentence to commonly treatable and it’s getting better every day. (Or was … until now.)
Yes, diabetes is a major new problem mostly due to obesity. But there are some extremely effective new drugs that Bobby Jr and his crew want to take off the market. He says people just need to “eat right.” (No word on whether they should take steroids like he does.) There was a time when that kind of thing was said to be nanny state authoritarianism but now all those people at the Trump rallies are apparently going to switch to arugula and beet juice because Bobby says they should. Sure.
It’s all fatuous nonsense. Yes, people should eat healthier food. I’m all for it. It would be nice if it was more available and people had the time to cook their own food at home and didn’t eat processed junk. Unfortunately, just as Trump and his flunkies keep insisting that Trump gets to do whatever he wants because America voted for him, America has also voted for fast food and sugar and processed junk and they think they get to do what they want as well.
It’s fine to proselytize about healthy eating (although I remember Michelle Obama being excoriated for doing that) but it won’t cure all the diseases that make us sick and die, no matter how much Bobby and his goo-goo cohort thinks it will. It’s medical science that has given us the extra, healthier decades that we enjoy today and ruining it will take them away again. Make America Healthy Again — like it was in the 1890s.