The federal government has been wrong on public health for decades

For those who heard Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s A Time for Choosing-level speech in which he ended his presidential campaign and endorsed President-elect Donald Trump, who noted his “Make America Healthy Again,” or MAHA, which in Hawaiian means “relief from pain,” campaign, or who read of his plans on taking office in the Trump administration and who wonder what it all means, where it came from, and where it is going, there a new book for you.
The book is Fat and Unhealthy: How “Body Positivity” Is Killing Us (And How to Save Yourself) by Tristan Justice, a reporter at the Federalist and author of the wellness Substack newsletter Social Justice Redux, Gina Bontempo, who has written for Bustle, Teen Vogue, and Evie Magazine and is a decadelong health and wellness coach. Courageously, they take on not just the body positivity movement but also Big Pharma, Big Food, Big Medicine, and Big Government.
Not surprisingly, given the toll of COVID-19, or rather Big Government’s response to it, exacted, which will be tallied for decades, not only on all Americans but also on the authors, they begin with the pandemic. The federal government knew early on that COVID-19 was the deadliest for those with obesity. Nonetheless, it failed to convey that information to the public, insisting instead that all, even K-12 students, were equally at risk. Thus, the federal government failed to confront the nation’s greatest health crisis — not COVID-19, but obesity (two-thirds of the nation’s adults are overweight or obese), which leaves Americans “fat, sick, and depressed.”
Worse yet, the federal government shuttered the “primary avenues of health and wellness” (fitness centers that were half closed permanently within two years of the lockdown) as it mandated that Americans stay home where, mostly alone, we snacked on “cookies, crackers, chips and other ultra-processed items,” whose sales jumped $10 billion in two years. Big Food joined in the “gluttonous pandemic,” offering fattening freebies for taking the government’s vaccination.
Unfortunately, Big Government getting it wrong on food, nutrition, and health did not begin with COVID-19 or even the notorious food pyramid. Instead, the government’s erroneous ways began shortly after World War II when Professor Ancel Keyes, who created K-rations for millions of soldiers and Marines, was asked by the Minnesota Department of Public Health to determine the cause of the heart disease hysteria, which swept the nation after former President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s heart attack in 1955. Despite the fact that he was not a physician and despite his research being “fraught with methodological flaws and statistical lies,” he became the father of the “diet-heart hypothesis” and influenced the nation’s dietary guidelines and health policies for 60 years.
Moreover, in a foreshadowing of what would be commonplace in the decades ahead, his research was funded by Procter & Gamble, a major producer of polyunsaturated vegetable oils and margarine. Not surprisingly, Keyes concluded that saturated fats were the cause of heart disease and advocated a low-fat, cholesterol-free, high-carb (and hence high glucose) diet. Others disagreed, concluding that sugar consumption, which had increased exponentially since the mid-1800s, was the culprit. However, Keyes, like a future expert (Dr. Fauci: “I represent science”), proclaimed he was “the arbiter of science.” Keyes exercised enormous political influence over government and healthcare institutions. Anyone who challenged his “monolithic narrative on nutrition” was discredited, and his research was defunded. Sound familiar?
In 1978, one of the dissenters, Vanderbilt University’s George Mann, a biochemist, confronted the “heart Mafia” for supporting its “dogma” and concluded, “For a generation, research on heart disease has been more political than scientific.”
The warning came too late. The year before, former Sen. George McGovern (D-SD), stung by his thrashing at the hands of former President Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential election (he lost 49 states) and in search of a legacy project, published the first federal Dietary Guidelines for the United States. Written not by scientists knowledgeable about nutrition but by Capitol Hill staffers — the lead staffer had a journalism degree — called for “the radical overhaul of the American diet.”
McGovern’s 1977 report eventually became the infamous food pyramid, which calls for “a whopping six to eleven servings of high-carb grains and its placement of fats at the top of the pyramid,” foisted upon the American people by the Department of Agriculture in 1992. It all but rules how the government feeds Americans and has been official U.S. policy for over three decades. Although the authors acknowledged that federal nutrition standards did not cause our current metabolic crisis, they did not reverse it. For example, the guidelines still advocate “a cocktail of over-processed seed oils above naturally occurring saturated fats such as those found in beef and salmon.” As a result of the federal government’s emphasis on grains and our gorging on ultraprocessed foods, which constitute 73% of the U.S. food supply, Americans have been on a “metabolic roller coaster.”
The body’s metabolic function, the chemical process by which it converts food and drink into energy, is “the very foundation of wellness,” physical, mental, and spiritual. One symptom of metabolic dysfunction, or more precisely, mitochondrial dysfunction, is obesity, which results from “a toxic diet and poor lifestyle habits.” In fact, argues the authors, “anxiety, depression, obesity, and just about every other illness to plague American life is all one disease.” By 2030, research shows half of all Americans will be obese, up from 13% in 1962. Tragically, for millions of Americans, a movement has sprung up to destigmatize this crisis.
In 2021, amid the COVID-19 pandemic and its ubiquitous “Quarantine Fifteen” weight gain, Cosmopolitan featured covers with noticeably obese models beneath the text, “This is healthy.” The next year, Self did the same, labeling obesity “The Future of Fitness.” The body positivity movement was mainstream, and its once “well-meaning message to accept ourselves where we are” was raising a white flag of surrender on obesity, “the nation’s number one health crisis.” As one body positivity advocate put it, “[T]he best way to win the war against fat is to give up the fight.”
Anyone stressing health and fitness is labeled “fatphobic,” and heaven help a celebrity who loses weight publicly (Adele). Not surprisingly, the movement embraces the “toxic mindset of far-left victimhood” (“fat liberation”/“fatphobia”) in its intersectional political campaign for social justice against classism and racism. Thus, it has drawn support from woke politicians and DEI/ESG-inclined, social justice-warring corporations.
As the body positivity movement removes emotional pressure on individuals to lose weight, it enriches corporations that profit off a “nation that is content to become chronically fat, sick, and depressed.” According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the healthcare industry, for example, rakes in $173 billion annually treating obesity. Meanwhile, the demand, by what will become lifelong users, for obesity drugs alone will swell to $100 billion annually by 2030. Astonishingly, the market value of Novo Nordisk, maker of Ozempic, exceeds Denmark’s GDP by over $100 billion.
It is no surprise that Big Food is a huge sponsor of body positivity. In 2023, for example, Dove, a subsidiary of Unilever, the British-based outfit that ranks in the top forty providers of packaged foods in this country, introduced its “Campaign for Size Freedom” as part of the new “movement to end body discrimination.” Likewise, Nestle, the Swiss food giant, General Mills, and Kellogg’s are also all in despite the fact that their cereals are filled with sugar (“more addictive to the brain than cocaine”), contain no healthy fats, and are ladened with chemicals.
Meanwhile, Big Food has underwritten and thus co-opted public health research, ingratiated itself with and unduly influenced major public health institutions, including the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics— founded in 1917, financed influencers, and even turned the heads of esteemed non-profit organizations, such as the NAACP. Big Pharma does the same.
Although it seems otherwise, the authors conclude that there is “no grand conspiracy” among “corporate power brokers … to keep the world’s population fat and sick for capital gain.” There is only a “convenient overlap between these corporate incentives, and the culture of the American consumer that enables this exploitation.” The way to end that enabling culture, they argue, is through “honest positivity,” by which each takes personal responsibility and confronts painful emotions of his or her condition and circumstances yet remain realistically optimistic about doing something about it.
Even better, they provide thoughtful advice that we have likely not heard for decades, given that Big Government, Big Pharma, and Big Food have, in one way or another, controlled the debate over and often lied about food, nutrition, and health for decades. Their chapters on how you can “Save Yourself” — nutrition (“Cook at home”), exercise (“While you can’t outrun a bad diet, you can’t out-diet a sedentary lifestyle either”), sleep (“There is no such thing as ‘catching up’ on your sleep”), community (“Quality relationships are just as important [as food, exercise, and sleep] to a long and healthy life, if not more important”), and prayer (“Faith’s importance to a strong mind-body connection is as fundamentally physical as it is mental”) — are likely to be read nowhere else. That is especially so given that, during COVID-19, Big Government locked us up (where we ate junk), closed our gyms, kept us sleepless in fear, separated us from one another, and shuttered our houses of worship.
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Regardless of what Kennedy does after Inauguration Day, his efforts will take weeks or months to take effect. Each of us, however, can see positive change immediately by acting now and not waiting for the swearing-in or our New Year’s resolutions.
William Perry Pendley, a Wyoming attorney and Colorado-based public-interest lawyer for three decades with victories at the Supreme Court, served in the Reagan administration and led the Bureau of Land Management for President-elect Donald Trump.