Former HUD secretary Ben Carson to promote rural health initiatives

Sept. 24 (UPI) — Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins swore in Dr. Ben Carson as the Agriculture Department’s national adviser for nutrition, health and housing on Wednesday.
Carson is a retired neurosurgeon and is tasked with implementing the rural health investments included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in his new role.
“As we continue to do the work of Make America Health Again and the intersection of agriculture and [Health and Human Services] with Secretary [Robert] Kennedy … there’s no greater American who has lived the American dream in such a remarkable way than Ben Carson,” Rollins told media outside the White House.
“The people who will benefit the most and perhaps be the most excited when they understand what this means are the American people, but especially the most vulnerable,” Rollins added.
Carson, 74, said he will work to help those who are in the nation’s lower socioeconomic classes to get good nutrition and lead healthier lives.
“We’re going to expand things that are shelved that are kept in the stores that are healthy foods,” Carson told media.
“We’re going to look at food from its inception,” including how soil is treated, how food is harvested, how it gets to stores and how it gets to homes and what happens in between, Carson explained.
“We want the things that happen to it in between to be good things, not things that add to the devaluation of food,” he added. “That’s going to make a big difference to our health.”
Carson said many other industrialized countries have life expectancies that continue to go up, while the life expectancy in the United States is coming down.
Carson was secretary of Housing and Urban Development during President Donald Trump’s first term in office.
He also is the founder and chairman of the American Cornerstone Institute, whose officials describe it as a non-partisan and non-profit entity that seeks to strengthen the bonds that hold the nation together.
Carson was the director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center for nearly 30 years and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, among dozens of other honors and awards.