Why MAHA Hasn't Done Anything About Processed Food

[00:00] "Something has to be done about  processed food in this country." Something. By someone. What  or who, we can't be sure,  

[00:14] or at least, we can't be  specific, for ... reasons. "Something's gotta be done about  processed food in this country."   That's the message that U.S. Health  and Human Services Secretary Robert F.  

[00:30] Kennedy Jr. delivered to 125 million  U.S. viewers during Super Bowl 60. This ad was promoting a new government  website called realfood.gov,  

[00:44] and it was made by people from the Make  America Healthy Again movement, MAHA,   which is effectively led by RFK Jr, though  his followers are very mad at him right now.

[00:58] I have an exegesis of that commercial that  I'd like to present to you now, and we'll   do a general wrap-up of MAHA's first year in  power. RFK started in this job a year ago now.

[01:12] One thing I can say for realfood.gov is that  it's a very attractive website, with dynamic   scrolling effects and such. You can build a  website like that yourself with Squarespace.

[01:24] Look at this template. Look at how  things kinda move as you scroll down,   maintaining your interest, getting your  attention, giving the site a sense of depth,   etc. This site or one like  it could be yours right now.

[01:38] For free, you can open it up and start replacing  all of their stock content with your own — your   photos, your text, and if you want to move  something, it's pretty much all drag-and-drop now,   and you can make different adjustments  for the mobile and desktop versions.

[01:54] Display your creative work, your resume, your  products for sale, take payments, take donations,   let customers schedule themselves for appointments  with you — it's all snap to do in Squarespace. And if you don't want to use the  templates, tell the computer what  

[02:09] you want in your website and it'll start  one for you in seconds. When you're ready   to pay for a domain name or to take the  site live, it's super affordable and you   can get 10% off with my code RAGUSEA at checkout.  Squarespace.com/Ragusea. Thank you, Squarespace.

[02:25] Anyway, the Make America Healthy Again  commercial that ran during the Super Bowl. Let's catch up the folks who are outside the  United States. Gridiron football is by far  

[02:38] our country's most popular sport, for legitimate  reasons, in my humble opinion. American football   is an intrinsically awesome game. I have  a whole video about that you could watch.

[02:51] American football is like 3D chess, except when  you move against a piece you have to actually go   over and physically fight the piece. It's rather  amazing that such an intensely cerebral game  

[03:04] has so captivated the U.S. public — probably  more for the violence than the chess, but... More importantly, football is pretty much  the only form of entertainment we all have  

[03:16] in common any more. Everything  else has been atomized via the   internet — "The Scattering," I call it,  the way we all fled to our own little   media silos once technology provided  us with sufficient options to do so.

[03:32] Arguably THE last great vestige of the old U.S.  monoculture is football. The Super Bowl is the   annual professional league championship game, it  is watched even by people who don't care about  

[03:46] football, in part for the advertisements.  Companies and organizations spend massive   sums to buy time in the Super Bowl's commercial  breaks, and the advertisements themselves tend  

[03:58] to have accordingly large production  budgets. They're like little movies. And MAHA's little movie during the Super Bowl  featured none other than the Baddest Man on   the Planet, "Iron" Mike Tyson, undisputed world  heavyweight boxing champion in the late 1980s,  

[04:17] which is the era that RFK Jr and Donald Trump  are still mentally living in, I think. Trump   hosted Tyson fights at his failed Atlantic City  casinos in the 80s. How do you fail with a casino?

[04:32] I have mixed feelings about Mike Tyson, if you  care. The public persona he has developed over   the years is appealing, in many ways. He's gotten  a number of laughs out of me through the years.

[04:45] As a boxer, Tyson's achievements are undeniable  — youngest guy to ever win the title,   at 20 years old. And to do that, Mike Tyson  had to overcome an upbringing in poverty that,  

[05:00] by anybody's account, was horrific. Horrific,  what this little boy endured — all of the ways   he was abused and discarded by the people  who should have cared for him the most.

[05:12] Today we see 59-year-old Mike Tyson with his  scary face tat and he's still all yoked up,   exploitation happened to a little  boy, and it was NOT his fault.

[05:30] a sociopathic killer is, frankly, miraculous. Nonetheless, it is important to acknowledge that  Mike Tyson is a registered sex offender, having  

[05:44] been convicted of rape in Indiana in 1992. If  you're gonna be a fan of this guy, you also gotta   read the account of then 18-year-old, Desiree  Washington, whom Tyson was convicted of raping.

[05:57] Her account is both harrowing and  persuasive — it's easy to see why   the jury convicted. And she is not the only  woman to accuse Mike Tyson of sexual assault.

[06:10] I think people can do something that awful in  their youth and come back from it — people can   reform and be readmitted into society, but you  have to do some things if you want to be forgiven.

[06:26] It's not enough to just lead a better life  going forward. You have to apologize. You   to try to make up for it as best you can.  Tyson has never meaningfully apologized.  

[06:41] He still maintains his innocence,  and I, for one, do not believe him. Mike Tyson is the spokesperson chosen by RFK  Jr and associates to represent their movement  

[06:56] in a cinematically black & white Super Bowl  commercial, probably because he's one of the   few real celebrities who will have anything  to do with the Trump administraiton. Anyway. Tyson starts off by saying that his sister Denise  "died of obesity at 25." It doesn't really matter,  

[07:14] but according to every record I can  find she was actually 24 when she died,   and there's no coroner's report saying she "died  of obesity," because that isn't really a thing. She was indeed very obese and died of an apparent  heart attack, and it's reasonable to suspect  

[07:30] those two things were related, even if other  comorbidities may have been involved. Regardless,   Denise Tyson was one of the few people in young  Mike Tyson's life who loved him and did not   abuse or abandon him. He called her "Niecy." The  hurt he shows in this ad feels very real to me.

[07:50] Tyson then recounts a period circa 2008, 2009  when he was out of boxing and not doing much   and he was depressed and his weight ballooned  — still jacked, as you can see in pictures from  

[08:05] the time. A lot of men would happily trade  bodies with even that version of Mike Tyson. But in this Super Bowl ad he describes  eating "a quart of ice cream" every hour,  

[08:20] which would be about 2000 calories an hour.  If we figure he's awake and eating for 16   hours a day that's 32,000 calories a day. I  can't imagine he was really eating that much,  

[08:34] but we can forgive a measure of exaggeration. Most  of us exaggerate when recalling our own lives. Tyson says in the ad that he had so much self-hate  when he was heavy, he wanted to commit suicide.  

[08:48] Then he shadow-boxes with the  camera a little as he says,   "We're the most powerful country in the world,  and we have the most obese, fudgy people."

[09:02] Fudgy is an unusual adjective in this context,  though I will note there is an apparent edit   between the words "obese" and "fudgy,"  so who knows what exactly he said on set.

[09:17] Ironic that I had a little edit in  there just then, if you saw that. Then Iron Mike takes a legitimately  satisfying sounding crunch out of an   apple and says "Something's gotta be done  about processed foods in this country."

[09:33] Hard cut to a black screen. The fine text at  the bottom says "Paid for by MAHA Center Inc.,"   which is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit,  which means taxpayer dollars probably did  

[09:47] not DIRECTLY fund this very expensive  ad placement. So at least there's that. The big text above is just a URL:  realfood.gov, which is a taxpayer-funded,  

[10:01] official U.S. government website. And  this is the health secretary's group,   so I think we should take this as a statement  by our government. Mike Tyson said it,  

[10:14] but the U.S. government chose to use  him as its mouthpiece in order to say... "Something's gotta be done about  processed food in this country." Something. By some one. Who, exactly?

[10:32] If you will allow me, I will quote my  friend and YouTube brother Vlad Vexler,   "It's a certain kind of political crime to  present institutions as opaque. It's doubly  

[10:50] a crime to present institutions as opaque  while you yourself are a member of them." Who would be the one to "do something about  processed food in this country?" It's RFK Jr,  

[11:06] right? The nation's leading health  official. He's the someone, along   with all the institutions operating under  his leadership — the National Institutes   of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and  Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration,  

[11:21] the Office of the Surgeon General.  All of that is in RFK's portfolio. My buddy Vald identifies a rhetorical tactic  used by post-truth populist politicians. Such  

[11:34] politicians rise to power by claiming that  our shared institutions are hopelessly corrupt   and/or incompetent. That gets you cheers in  a lot of rooms. Even I think the institutions  

[11:49] I just mentioned are at least a little corrupt  and/or incompetent, and have been since forever. But what do you do when you suddenly find  yourself in charge of them? How does a  

[12:02] flame-throwing populist transition from  the role of outside agitator to the guy   in charge? It's a tough transition, which  is one reason why RFK Jr. is failing at it.

[12:19] Something's gotta be done? Buddy,  YOU'RE the guy who is supposed to   do the thing. You should know what needs  to be done, and you should be doing it.   But you continue to talk as though  someone else is in charge. You are  

[12:35] an insider using the rhetoric of outsiders  — trying to have your cake and eat it too. I mean, if you're not in charge, RFK Jr, who is?  Maybe it's the "deep state," an epithet used to  

[12:52] describe the career civil servants who do most of  the work that any modern government actually does. In one year, RFK Jr has politically purged U.S.  health institutions of about 20,000 career civil  

[13:08] servants — half of them he fired, half of them  he pushed to resign in various ways, setting back   U.S. biomedical research by decades, according to  many relevant experts whose opinions I respect.

[13:23] If Bobby Jr hasn't yet excorised  the "deep state" from his agency,   then I don't know what he's  been doing this whole time. Imagine being a passenger on a ship, the ship  starts to sink, the captain fires half the crew  

[13:39] and then starts running around saying "someone's  gotta do something about this sinking ship!!" It's terrifying, and it serves  only the person in power who is   trying to evade accountability.  Meet me at camera 3, Bobby Jr.

[13:58] you are not hallucinating from riding a  stationary bike in a sauna with Kid Rock,   you actually are the captain of the HHS Victory.  If there's someone at Health and Human Services  

[14:14] who's stopping you from doing something about  processed foods in this country, then fire them. But that, of course, is probably not what's going  on here. The real reason RFK Jr. has been unable  

[14:26] to do something about processed foods is that  he is, effectively, in a coalition government.   MAHA wants to legally restrict processed  foods, but MAGA wants to cut government  

[14:42] regulation of private enterprise. These  are inherently contradictory positions. We saw that contradiction in action this  very week, regarding the agricultural  

[14:54] herbicide glyphosate, sold as "Roundup"  by the infamous big ag tyrant Monsanto. One of RFK Jr's few real world accomplishments  as a lawyer prior to joining the Trump  

[15:09] administration was that he helped win a $300  million lawsuit against Monsanto, in 2018,   in which a California jury agreed that glyphosate  had contributed to the cancer of RFK's client.

[15:21] He won against Monsanto, despite the fact  that any link between cancer and glyphosate   remains a matter of legitimate scientific  debate. And I am no defender of Monsanto.  

[15:33] Screw those guys. But even I can say the case  against glyphosate is hardly open and shut. Come back to the present day, and  RFK's new boss, President Trump,  

[15:46] has just issued an executive order aimed at  INCREASING U.S. production of glyphosate. RFK had to say something about  this. He had to square the circle.  

[16:00] So, RFK put out a statement this week that I doubt   he wrote. It's way too well-reasoned  and well-written for the brainworm guy.

[16:12] This statement attributed to RFK  Jr basically says, "Hey guys,   I still think glyphosate might be bad, but U.S.  agriculture is very dependent on it right now,  

[16:25] and if we were to ban all synthetic herbicides it  would cause a major disruption in the food supply.   We need to focus on making a long-term  transition away from these chemicals."

[16:37] That's basically what RFK's statement said,  and that, of course, is the correct thing   to say. That is the adult thing to say.  But RFK Jr has trained his supporters  

[16:50] to be so suspicious of institutions that  now many of them are suspicious of him,   and they freaked out about this glyphosate  statement. Talk about reaping what you sow.

[17:03] It's rare that I get to use that expression in  its native agricultural context. Feels good. Demagogary is great for getting elected.  It's awful for actually governing. Because  

[17:17] you need people to trust the government if you're  actually going to accomplish anything in office,   well then there isn't gonna  be any trust leftover for you.

[17:29] Or for the next guy. And how has RFK  needlessly demolished trust in institutions? Well let's go to RealFood.gov, the  website that Super Bowl ad was promoting.

[17:47] "Real food wins," it says on  top. I can get behind that. Next line: "America is the greatest  country on Earth. And the sickest."

[18:03] Folks, serious people don't communicate in such  sweeping generalizations, because they usually   aren't accurate. The U.S. is not the sickest  country on earth, by any definition. We are  

[18:17] not sicker than the Central African Republic, or  South Sudan. We are not sicker than Afghanistan. Lots of different scholars and organizations  have put together "healthiest country" rankings  

[18:29] and the U.S. always ends up in the  top half of healthiest countries,   though you may be surprised how low we tend to  rank within that healthiest half of countries. We rank quite well on things like life  expectancy and infant morality. We tend  

[18:45] to rank a little more poorly on things  like cancer and rates of chronic disease,   but that's not necessarily because we are sicker. Chronic conditions tend to kill people in poorer  countries. Here, we're rich enough to diagnose  

[19:01] and treat our chronic problems and to live with  them, instead of dying from them in childhood. driven by high life expectancy. If you live to be  very old, you are much more likely to get cancer,  

[19:19] because cancer is just something that  happens to old bodies. Old cells. Old DNA. About a third of cancers are diagnosed  in people age 75 and over. The mean  

[19:31] life expectancy in Afghanistan is 66.  A lot of people there don't live long   enough to get cancer. That doesn't mean  they're healthier. It means the opposite.

[19:44] What the U.S. really is is unhealthy relative  to Western Europe and Northeast Asia and   other highly developed economies, and I guess  that's less snappy than saying "America is the  

[19:59] sickest country in the world," but I'm sorry,  facts don't always make for the best slogans. And I'll note again that RFK is constantly  pounding the table about diet and "toxins"  

[20:12] but says almost nothing about access to  quality, affordable health insurance,   which is something we know for  sure makes people healthier.   The oligarchs love that RFK focuses on  food rather than healthcare, because it  

[20:27] passes the financial and moral responsibility  for fixing the problem down onto poor people. Anyway, let's keep reading this website. "For  decades we've been misled by guidance that  

[20:42] prioritized highly processed food, and are now  facing rates of unprecedented chronic disease." What the hell is he talking about? Who  has been out there issuing guidance to  

[21:01] PRIORITIZE processed foods? Like, no one!  Certainly nobody in the last couple decades.   You could point to isolated cases, like the 80s  when they told you to eat margarine instead of  

[21:16] butter, but that's like one case. In the  80s. Where RFK Jr's brain still lives. And by the way, there are isolated cases where the  

[21:29] more processed food is actually better  for you. It's just generally the case   that a fresh food-based diet is probably  better for most people. But moving on... "For the first time, official U.S. guidance calls  on Americans to avoid highly processed food."

[21:49] That's also not true at all. Does no one  remember the Obama administration? Eight   years of Michelle Obama campaigning to get  processed foods out of schools, and everybody  

[22:02] on Fox News freaking out and saying "she's  gonna make our kids gay with kale" or whatever. The fact is, my fellow Americans,  your government has been working   on this problem for many years across many  administrations, Republican and Democrat.

[22:20] which was endorsed by the Biden administration,  to fund more studies looking into how replacing   one food with another actually affects  chronic disease and stuff like that, and to  

[22:32] get Medicare to pay for things like nutrition  counseling or even medically tailored meals. When a guy like RFK gets into power and says  "Everybody who came before me was lying to you  

[22:45] and trying to poison you," he's using falsehoods  to destroy trust, and that is the political   equivalent of a sugar high. It feels great at  first — it maybe gets you elected — but then  

[23:03] what to you do when you've trained everyone  to distrust the institutions you now lead? Not much, is apparently the answer. This  realfood.gov website pretty accurately  

[23:17] lists the very modest achievements of RFK's  tenure as it pertains to dietary health. "Phasing Out Petroleum-Based Dyes from Food." Yeah, he got the industry to informally agree  to stop using some colerants they mostly  

[23:33] weren't using anyway, but there's basically no new  regulation here, because the Trump administration   is anti-regulation. The initiative to ban red  dye #3 began under the Biden administration.

[23:49] Also, there's nothing inherently wrong with  petroleum-based food dyes. Petroleum is just   dead stuff, as all your food is. And we have  no reason to think the "natural" dyes are   better for you or are even more "natural"  in any meaningful sense of that word.

[24:06] "Removing Soda and Candy from SNAP." SNAP is food assistance for poor people in the  U.S. It's like a special government credit card  

[24:18] you can use for food. The Trump administration  has NOT actually removed soda or candy from SNAP.   They just say they want to do it, and in the  meantime they've cut funding for SNAP by 20%,  

[24:31] despite the fact that fresh food is  generally MORE expensive than junk food. Making it so that people can  only buy healthy food with SNAP   used to be a Democratic talking point.  Republicans decried it as nanny-statism.

[24:50] FWIW, I'm not sure how I feel about it. I also  don't love that parents are out there buying   junk food for their kids with SNAP benefits,  but I'm not totally sure what to do about that,  

[25:03] because I'm not sure how you write a legal  definition of "healthy food" that you can   apply fairly or even coherently  to every item in a grocery store. Also, I just feel like these kinds of  restrictions assault the dignity of poor people.  

[25:22] RFK hasn't actually done anything about it yet. Nothing on this mere five-item list of  first-year accomplishments is an actual   action of any kind. It's a bunch of "we're  looking into," "we're reexamining," etc etc,  

[25:40] and part of that is because RFK's boss won't  let him issue any major new regulations,   because MAGA and MAHA did such a good  job undermining trust in institutions   that now people won't accept their  institutions actually doing very much.

[25:57] Well if you're not gonna do the  thing, Bobby Jr, then who will? Maybe it'll be the next administration.  

[26:10] But the next administration will have a much  harder time doing anything, because you, Bobby Jr,   have blown through our budget of trust. Thanks  for that, buddy. I hope it bought you a lot of  

[26:26] tight blue jeans you can wear to the sauna.  Wipe that bench down before I use it, ok?