Dr. Mark Hyman: Coming up on this week’s episode of the Doctor’s Farmacy,
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: We know it’s not genes. Genes do not cause epidemics. They can provide a vulnerability, but you need an environmental toxin. Our kids didn’t suddenly get lazy. We are mass poisoning our children.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Welcome to the Doctor’s Farmacy. I’m Dr. Mark Hyman, and this is a place for conversations that matter. Now. Americans are sicker than ever, and it’s not only resulting in poor, physical, and mental health. It’s impacting our economy, our environment, our children’s future, and even our national security. So today I’m talking about how we got here and what’s needed to turn things around with. My friend, activist and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Is an independent candidate for the president of the United States. He’s the founder of the Waterkeeper Alliance, the world’s largest clean water advocacy group, and served as its longtime chairman and attorney. He then went on and found the children’s health defense where he served as chairman and chief litigation counsel in his campaign to adjust childhood chronic disease and toxic exposures. He was also on the team that prosecuted and won the case against Monsanto for glyphosate’s role in causing cancer as president.
Dr. Mark Hyman: He promises to restore the middle class, to unwind the war machine, unravel corporate capture and the chronic disease epidemic, which I care a lot about. Secure the border, protect our wild places, improve the quality of the water we drink, and the air we breathe, heal the divide, fix our public education system, take care of our veterans, support the trade, and make homes affordable again. He also promises to support regenerative farming and other key priorities. So I encourage you to learn more about him by visiting Kennedy 20 four.com. Now, while I’m not endorsing any particular candidate, I was interested to talk to Bobby because he’s one of the only candidates I’m aware of who recognizes how making Americans healthier, we’ll fix so many of the issues we’re facing today. Bobby shares from his perspective that we are mass poisoning our children and why we need to get more information out to people about this.
Dr. Mark Hyman: We discuss how corporate capture in the public and private sectors is keeping America sick. And Bobby talks about how we can begin to reduce healthcare costs and improve health outcomes across the country. We also identify why America experienced such a high death rate from COVID-19, and how ultra processed food is not only making us sick physically, but it’s also making us more anxious, more depressed, and more inflamed. We talk about why it is that we crave food, it’s so bad for us and how we can end our sugar addictions and move toward better health and more. Now let’s dive into my conversation with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Hey, Bobby, it’s great to see you again. How are you doing?
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Hey Mark, where are you?
Dr. Mark Hyman: I’m in La Paz in Bolivia, 13,000 feet. So hopefully I’m had of auction in my brain to do this conversation. We just came out of the Amazon and I’ve been down to Chile with you.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: I think I talked to you about that before that I, because you and I visited Peru together, but I had lived my senior year in high school for half the year I lived in ve, which is up in the Altiplano in Peru with Indian Tribe, the I Mars, and it was 14,000 feet. And it really does a lot of weird things to your body and you’re everything.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Well, hopefully I’m in a box, have this conversation, but wanted to talk about your position on health. You’re one of the few candidates out there, and the presidential race is probably the only one who’s focused on improving the Health of America by not just having access to healthcare, which we all have, but really addressing the root causes of why our healthcare system is so screwed up, why America is so sick, why we’re so overweight, and what we can do about it. So I’m excited to talk to you about a lot of this because we’ve together done a lot of physical activity. We’ve rafted down rivers, we’ve hiked mountains, we’ve done a lot of fun stuff, and we’re always doing active things. And fitness is a really key part of your life and your work, and it’s actually how you maintain, I think, your energy on the campaign trail.
Dr. Mark Hyman: So I want to start by laying out a little bit of the landscape of what we’re facing and why we really need to double down on our thinking about the health of America, which really affects our global standing in the world, our economic competitiveness, our productivity. And right now we’re screwed. I would say we’re seeing 75% of Americans overweight. 45% of kids go according to new data. 93.2% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy, which means they have either their high blood sugar, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, or overweight or have had a heart attack or stroke. Six in 10 Americans have a chronic disease, a large part, this is due the explosion of ultra processed food over the last 20, 30 years that drives poor metabolic health. It’s also affecting our mental health crisis, increasing a lot of our depression, anxiety, polarization, violence, aggression, all because of the food we’re eating and the cost is staggering.
Dr. Mark Hyman: As president, you have to deal with our budget and $4.3 trillion are spent every year on healthcare now one in $5 in our economy, and at least also huge amounts of low productivity with billions of dollars a year in loss productivity. And what’s really frightening, Bobby, is there are life expectancy going down with the largest year over year drop in the last two years in our history, which is far below all other nations, and we’re more than 60 on the list of life expectancy in the world. And what’s really also, as I began to look at this data, it was really interesting. We have a wealth gap in this country, right? 39% increase since 1980, meaning the rich and the poor have about a 39% spread since 1980, but the death gap has increased 570% since 1980, and it’s worse in the south and the Midwest, which are mostly red states because of increasing rates of diabetes and obesity.
Dr. Mark Hyman: And our government policies don’t address this. In 2021, the GAO, the government accountability report on chronic disease and nutrition found over 200 policies, 21 agencies on nutrition, working mostly across purposes, making America sicker and increasing healthcare costs. On one hand, we say with the dietary guidelines, don’t eat sugar and reduce your intake of all that. And on the other hand, with our SNAP or food stamp program, 75% of the food is processed ultra processed food, 10% is soda, meaning $10 billion year own soda. So we’re in this situation where even the FDA Commissioner Robert K has said, our life expectancy’s going the wrong way. We’re the top health officials in the country. We don’t fix it. Who? Well, and you also talked about this. You were quoted in the Washington Post where you said if we had a regulatory agencies that were interested in action looking at data, we’ll be trying to figure out why all cores, mortality for Americans has increased and they’re not covid deaths. So we don’t really have a healthcare system. We have a sick care system. And those who profit most big ag, big food, big pharma, they just perpetuate that system that benefits from chronic disease, which is horrible. So would you consider this a national emergency? And as president, how would you begin to really address this problem?
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Yeah, this is one of the reasons, the key reasons that I ran for President Mark to end this chronic disease epidemic and to restore Americans to good health. When my uncle was president in 1960, if you go back and look at his speeches and his thoughts back then, and he was extraordinarily distressed at that point that we were losing to Europeans. And if he could look at Americans today, he would be in shock because we are so sick. As you say, the obesity during his, when he was in office, obesity was at 13%. Today it’s at 42%, 45%. Now, 75% of Americans are overweight. When he was in office, 6% of Americans had chronic disease by 19 86, 11 0.8%. So it had doubled between 1960 and 1986. It’s 26 years. By 2006, it was at 54%. And we don’t really know what the numbers are right now because of the, I would say purposeful data chaos that comes out of NIH, that they will not give us straight ways of measuring baselines of understanding why health, why public health is declining so precipitously in our country. And it’s clearly, these are epidemics. The epidemics, we’re seeing epidemics of all these chronic diseases, not only obesity, neurological disease, A-D-D-A-D-H-D, speech delay, language delay, tics, Tourette syndrome, narcolepsy, a SD, autism, all of these diseases that you and I never heard of when we were kids,
Dr. Mark Hyman: There was that one troubled kid to class and now it’s like half the class,
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Right? Yeah. I mean, autism’s gone and one in 10,000 in my generation. So the 70-year-old men, one in 10,000, have full-blown autism. And by that I mean nonverbal non toilet train, stemming toe walking, hand flapping. You don’t see the people like that my age. But one in every, according to the CDC one in every 34 kids looks like that. What’s happening, one in 22 boys. Then we have the autoimmune diseases. It suddenly blew up in the early nineties, juvenile diabetes, which I never saw when I was a kid, rheumatoid arthritis and all these exotic disease like Crohn’s disease, lupus, and then the allergic diseases that suddenly appeared at the same time in the mid nineties. Peanut allergies, food, I had anaphylaxis, eczema, whoever heard of eczema, nobody. And now all these kids have it. They’re all scratching. They all have the rashes and they’re all medicated.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: They’re taking Adderall, they’re taking antidepressants, they’re taking Ritalin. They’ve got their albuterol and inhalers in every classroom. They’ve got EpiPens in every classroom. And there’s a study then that Congress asked EPA to do, and EPA is captured agency, but it’s captured not by the pharmaceutical industry. And it’s not really heavily captured by the agricultural industry because it doesn’t really directly regulate those. It is captured by oil, oil and coal and gas and chemical. But Congress said to EPA tell us what year the autism epidemic began. So EPA actually did a real study with real science, and the scientists came back and said 1989. Now it was the change year. So the challenge is, and if you look at all of these diseases, they follow kind of that same timeline. So what happened in 1989, what happened in the early nineties? We know it’s not genes. Genes do not cause epidemics. They can provide a vulnerability, but you need an environmental toxin. Our kids didn’t suddenly get lazy. We are mass poisoning our children. And so you have to figure out a toxin that was introduced and became ubiquitous in 1989, the mid nineties. And that affects every demographic from Cubans and Ki Bisque to the Inuit in Alaska and Homer Alaska. And there aren’t that many candidates. One of them is high fructose corn syrup. Clearly all these processed foods that my generation began eating, I mean, we were eating hostess s Twinki. By the way, I
Dr. Mark Hyman: Like hostess cupcakes. I used to go to the corner store in Queens and get them.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: I wish I had a dollar for every one of those that I ate before I met you. Of course I’d still eat them if I could.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Well, you’re good. You listened to me, Bobby, you stopped drinking soda. You did a good job. You got fitter. Actually, since I met you 15 years ago, you actually are fitter and better shape than you were back then. It’s impressive.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: I was drinking nine cokes a day. I actually, I have this app called Days, I’ll show you that. It says 3057 days without a Coke, without any soda.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, that’s amazing. That’s about how long I’ve known you a little bit more. It took me a while to get you convinced.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: That’s almost 10 years. And I was drinking a lot of Coke. I was drinking like eight or nine cokes a day.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, so you’re right, Bobby. The ultra processed food is a huge issue and it’s exploded in the last decades, and it’s really been one of those inciting factors that’s driven our epidemic. And I think we’re looking for a smoking gun, by the way.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: This is ID with no sugar in it. There you
Dr. Mark Hyman: Go. Thanks, Bobby. But we really have, smoking is an easy, literally smoking gun and it’s linked to lung cancer. And so in food, it’s been very difficult. Like what food should it be packed, sugar or salt? But I think that what we’re coming to understand in science, and there’s a huge body of evidence now that supports this is an ultra processed food, which is really defined by this Nova classification that degrades food on how processed it is. Like tomato can is processed, but it’s minimally processed. Whereas Twinkie is extremely processed and it’s made up of deconstructed food ingredients that are originally food. But then they deconstructed into these molecular science projects and they reassemble ’em. It looked like something you could eat, but they’re not really food by definition. And that has been driving the epidemic of obesity, diabetes, all these chronic illnesses that destroys our gut microbiome.
Dr. Mark Hyman: It drives inflammation, it affects mental health, and it’s linked to depression, suicide, violence. It’s quite interesting. And it also has increased in mortality for every 10% of your diet. That’s ultra processed food. Your risk of death goes up by 14%. And it’s 60 plus percent of our diet is adults and 67% of kids’ diets. And I think, how would you think about addressing this as president? Because in my view, we’re seeing a slow moving tsunami. We’re all getting our suntan on the beach, and this is coming at us so fast. We’re really now going to see in the next generation the serious consequences because our kids, like you mentioned, are all coming into adulthood, sick and overweight and on lots of medications.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Yeah. My inclination is that is to give people good information and at the same time maximize freedom. So I wouldn’t tell people what to eat and what not to eat, but what I would tell people is I’m going to take the NIH and bring it back to its original mission. And let me explain that. When I was a little kid, NIH was the gold standard scientific agency on earth, just like NASA was for space. When I was a little boy, we lived in McLean, which is only a few minutes from Bethesda, Maryland. And my mother had an assistant who worked for her whose husband was a scientist at IH. I used to go down to NIH because I was fascinated by science. And I would go and look at the Guinea pigs and the rats and the mice and all the things they were doing.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: And during that period, mark, there were a lot of new countries that were beginning. There were 122 new nations that began after World War ii. And a lot of ’em were African and colonial nations that got their sovereignty. They didn’t have the money to have a real scientific agency. So a lot of them in their constitutions and their statutory framework would say, if FDA approves it, if NIH says it’s true, then we will consider it true. So they didn’t even have their agencies, but they relied on ours because everybody trusted American science. And then something happened to NIH and a whole bunch of, there was a lot of corporate capture, all these mechanisms of corporate capture. But most importantly, in 1980, the by Dole Act was passed, and that act gave NIH and NIH individual scientists the rights to collect royalties on any drug that they worked on. So for example, today the Moderna vaccine was produced by NIH and it’s made tens of billions of dollars. Well, half that money will go to NIH,
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: And some of that money goes to scientists who work in, there’s six scientists who get to collect $150,000 a year forever. Well, of course, if you have those kind of perverse economic incentives and conflicts of Pinterest, it is going to subsume the regulatory function and beneath the kind of mercantile ambitions of those individuals who can make a lot of money, if you’re paying for your boat and your alimony and your house and your children’s education, a drug that you’re supposed to be regulating, you may turn a blind eye to some of the problems with that drug and you may do everything you can to get it through the regulatory process and get it mandated. And that’s what’s happened. But not only that, the entire function of NIH has changed so that I think it was 2016 or 2017 when I actually did this calculation, there was 220 new drugs approved by FDA and all of them had come from NIH.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: So NIH is now the biggest incubator of pharmaceutical products. And what’s happened is they’re no longer doing what they’re supposed to be doing, which is to answer the question, why do we have an autism epidemic? Why do we have an obesity epidemic? It’s pretty easy to figure out. There’s only a certain number of suspects. You have processed foods, the pfoa, you have OID pesticides, atrazine, glyphosate, cell phone radiation. There’s a limited universe and you can figure out pretty easily which ones are causing which effects, and it’s probably cumulative. So they’re all probably working on similar biological pathways and earning our kids. You can figure out that too. NIH does not do that science. In fact, if you try to do that science, let’s say you’re a university young associate professor at Stanford and you say, Hey, you know what? I have access to the vaccine. I have access to the California or the Florida healthcare records, so I can look at exposures that people made and then subsequent medical claims, whether it’s vaccines or your food diet, you can look at all that. I’m going to study and find out why do we have an autism epidemic? Why do we have an obesity epidemic? If you try to do those studies, you could easily jeopardize your job in your future. We
Dr. Mark Hyman: Call the NIH, the National Institute of Health, but it’s not really it’s diseases and it’s focused not on the root causes, which is really unfortunate.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: So what I’m going to do is I’m going to go down to NIH during my first week in office and I’m going to assemble all the division chairs and the branch chairs, and I am going to say to them, we’re going to do something different. We have a NIH as a $42 billion annual budget. It distributes that money to 56,000 scientists mainly at universities to develop new drugs and to do studies. And I’m going to say we are going to make it our priority now as fast as possible to fund studies that are going to tell us what’s causing this epidemic. And then I’m going to get those studies funded and I’m going to get them underway every way of looking at ’em. I’m also going to call in all the scientific journals into the Justice Department, and I’m going to say to them, you’ve been serving the entrant. You’ve been lying to the public. You are representing yourself as a neutral and reliable source of health information. And you have done tremendous damage to public health because you are not that you are publishing thing. You are publishing fake science that is designed to promote the Arkansas ambitions of the pharmaceutical industry and of the food industry, of the big agricultural interests of the oil and gas and coal and all these other big powerful industries.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: And you are lying to the public and you’ve caused tremendous damage to public health. And I’m going to hold you irresponsible. I’m going to litigate against you under the racketeering laws, under the general tort laws. I’m going to find a way to sue you unless you come up with a plan right now to show how you’re going to start publishing real science and stop retracting the real science and publishing the fake pharmaceutical science by these phony industry mercenaries, scientists that we call biostitutes. That’s what they publish in the New England Journal of Medicine. The land said Eat biopharma, all of these other big publications, Elsevier, and I’m going to straighten that out so that people can actually get real information. The other thing that that’s going to do, mark, is it will give the attorneys a chance to litigate these issues in court because there’s no good science on these issues.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: You can’t sue a company for making your children fat for poisoning them so that their microbiome doesn’t work anymore. Once you create that science, once you have 15 or 20 studies that show that, then those kinds of suits become possible. And that’s how you really change policy. Just like we did with the Monsanto case, critical threat, we got a critical threshold of studies and animal studies, observational studies, epidemiological studies, bench studies that showed that glyphosate was causing non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in Roundup. And before that, if you were the president of the United States and you tried about a ban roundup, you would go nowhere. It doesn’t matter who you’re, but if you have enough science to get past the DALBERT threshold, which is a threshold in federal courts where the judge has to make an independent judgment at their sufficient science critical mass of science, 15, 20, 25 studies out there that show the link between this exposure and this illness that’s called Albert, and the judge is not allowed to send it to a jury until you have that package of science. And if what I’m going to do, I’m going to provide that enough science, sufficient science on each one of these exposures and each one of these injuries to show who’s causing what and all the responsible in court.
Dr. Mark Hyman: I think that’s so important, Bobby, because this has been so neglected in the national of health budget. There’s really almost nothing for nutrition research, which is the biggest driver of so much of the things we’re talking about, the chronic illness, the obesity, the diabetes, the mental health crisis, and yet there are other issues. You mentioned environmental chemicals, various kinds of stresses and so forth that are there, things like glyphosate affecting your microbiome. But the ultra processed food is something that we really haven’t doubled down and studied, and it’s driving all the other diseases. So at the NIH, they study cancer and they give you 6 billion for that or heart disease or diabetes, but they’re not studying the root causes. And I think in medicine, we’re really so focused on the downstream things that we can treat with the medication rather than the upstream root causes.
Dr. Mark Hyman: And it’s going to require a fairly rigorous approach looking at one, the science, and two, why are we actually promoting policies even with the science that we have now, which shows the damage of ultra processed food where we’re paying have a hundred billion a year SNAP bill, which is a food stamp that most of that is for junk food and ultra processed food, which we know is killing people and 10% of soda, then we’re paying for that on the back end with Medicaid and Medicare for all the chronic disease. We’re also seeing the challenges of the capture, not just the agencies like the FDA and the USCA and HHS and EPA and CDC, but also Congress. I sat down with a congressman the other day who I got excited about what I was talking about. I met with them about our food fix campaign to try to transform our food system and actually have reimbursement for nutrition and healthcare and many other efforts.
Dr. Mark Hyman: And he lost 25 pounds by following the suggestions I made. He cut down sugar. I said, why don’t we do a sugar detox for cotton? He goes, well, I can’t really do that. I’m on the Candy Caucus. And I’m like, oh my God. Everybody is unwilling to actually step up and do the right thing because of this. And I wonder how we begin to address this corporate capture because we have all the agencies not coordinated around food. We have all these things siloed. It’s affecting every area of our society, and we’re dealing with all things separately like we’re dealing with the issue of chronic disease and with medication or ozempic for obesity. We’re dealing with the economic budget deficit and our national debt by talking about how we cut spending and increase taxes and all these things without talking about why we’re having this right. One to $5 of our economy is from chronic disease, mostly preventable through lifestyle. We have to start with those root cost things and address this. So how would you think about dealing with this corporate capture process which is affecting our health and our healthcare?
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Well, I mean, I think there’s a number of ways to deal with it. One is what I said before is to make sure they’re producing good science and then you have a market response. Once you get good information to the public, you can have a market response to bad food to bad to help people. You’re not helping it to tell mothers you’re not helping your mother, your children feed them fruit loops. You are not doing what a parent ought to do to give your kids dies and sugar a mixture of dyes and sugar and high fructose corn syrup.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, right now I’m in South America, Bobby and all the labels on the foods, they’re all clear. Green is good for you. Yellow caution red, this is bad for you. And anybody can understand that even if you have no education with currently, our FDA labeling is so confusing. You have to be a nutrition PhD to understand it, and even then you can’t really get it. So we have to change labeling. We have to change marketing. We have to change research infrastructure. We have to change how we’re reimbursing healthcare services to incentivize doctors and healthcare providers to provide nutrition services, deal with the root causes. And right now we don’t do that. You can get paid for doing a stent, but you can’t pay for doing an intensive lifestyle care program like we do at Cleveland Clinic where we’re reversing diabetes, reversing heart disease, reversing these chronic illnesses using food as medicine. So it seems to be one of the central things that we can do to radically shift our trajectory in America, which is like I said, where I think 60th or worse in our life expectancy despite spending twice as much as any other nation on healthcare.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: And then the other thing I’m going to do is just to change the corporate culture at these agencies, and that is going to require a president who actually understands how the agencies work. I’ve litigated against almost all these agencies against N-I-H-C-D-C-F-D-A-E-P-A-F-C-C. I recently won a case against FCC in the Federal Court of appeals lying to the public about cell phone radiation. I’m involved in litigation right now involving ddo DOT Department of Transportation because I’m representing a thousand families in East Ade Ohio whose lives were appended by the Norfolk Southern people. All of these problems and all of these agencies are coming from corporate capture and I know how to unravel it. I know in many of these agencies who the individuals are, I can name them off the top of my head, who are putting corporate capture on the steroids. I understand the perverse incentives that also amplify corporate capture.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Why does FDA get 50% of its budget from pharmaceutical companies? Why can NIH scientists get royalties on the products they’re supposed to be regulating? Why does NIH get royalties on products? It’s supposed to be refining problems with, it’s a bribery, it’s an eternal loop of bribery, of corrupt bribery. And I’m going to go to these agencies, I’m going to pick people instead of picking like Donald Trump promised that he would unravel the swamp, but then he appoints John Bolton to head NSA, who is the face of the military industrial complex. He appoints Scott Gottlieb, who’s a business partner of Pfizer to run FDA, and
Dr. Mark Hyman: Then he went back to work for Pfizer afterwards. Yeah,
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: FDA does an $88 billion under him for Pfizer, and then he goes back to work for Pfizer again. So it’s Alex Azar is another lobbyist from the pharmaceutical industry who gets appointed to the head of NIH. And if you look at all of the regulatory agencies, they were all being run by people who were within those industries. And I’m not going to do that. I’m going to bring people of integrity into government who will change the culture of those agencies and reward the branch and division chairs that actually are doing public health and get rid of, I’m going to change some. The policies about the remote that allows these, I think the last six FDA chiefs have gone to work for pharmaceutical companies within a year of leaving the FDA, I don’t know exactly.
Dr. Mark Hyman: It shouldn’t be called the FDA Bobby because it should be called the Federal Drug Administration, not the Food and Drug Administration, because 7% of the budget is on food, 93% is on pharma and food safety is what they’re looking at, which is whether you get salmonella or food poisoning. And that’s about 2,400 people dying a year. We have more than that dying every day from eating our, what we call a standard American diet or sad diet or ultra processed diet. And they’re not doing anything about that. The labeling is horrible. The regulation of chemicals and food, ultra processed food is not there. We have the data and they’re not acting on it. And for me as a doctor, seeing these people in my office, and I’ve been a doctor for over 30 years now, and in my own career, my own life, I’ve seen this explosion of these diseases that you mentioned at the onset of the podcast from all the obesity and metabolic diseases to the environmentally related diseases, neurogenerative diseases, neurodevelopmental diseases, autoimmune inflammatory diseases.
Dr. Mark Hyman: These are things that didn’t exist at their volume that we have now. And the FDA is really not addressing this, and our n NIH is not addressing this, and our healthcare system itself is incentivized to actually make more money doing more stuff rather than making people healthier. I mean, imagine if you had a car that you drove off a lot and you had to pay for the car and it didn’t work after you drove it off the lot. That’s essentially what we do with our current healthcare system. We don’t pay for results and outcomes. We pay for doing more stuff, more surgeries, more medications, more doctor’s visits, more hospitalizations, and that’s got to change.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: You know what? Another thing that we can do is, and I’m saying this with a due concern for privacy or individual privacy, but you can depersonalize medical records and digitalize, a lot of them are digitalized anyway. Once they’re digitalized, you can do a medical informatics system that essentially is constantly doing epidemiological studies on every drug and comparing one diabetes drug outcome to another diabetes drug outcome and then saying, we’re only going to pay for the one where we maximize the bank for buck. And none of that happens. There’s none of those kind of everything. Everybody is the mercy of the pharmaceutical reps. The doctors are prescribing what they tell ’em to prescribe, and the public is at the mercy of an FDA that is owned. The FDA is just a stock puppet. The industry isn’t supposed to regulate. And all of this is easily changed. I’m not saying I’m going to be able to accomplish it all on day one, but I’m going to accomplish it very quickly. And what I’ve said to people, if I haven’t dramatically reduced the occurrence of chronic disease in children by my third year in office that people shouldn’t vote for me again, I’m that confident that I’m going to be able to change this.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, it’s true. It’s not a lack of knowledge or knowing what to do. It’s really a lack of the political will, a lack of the right incentives in business, a lack of awareness and education in the public. And we can do that. And we’ve done it before with smoking and other campaigns that have been effective in reducing that. And I think, I don’t know if it’s going to require litigation against some of these corporations that are doing harmful things. I think no one intends to, but the downstream consequences, unintended consequences of this ultra processed food explosion is something we can’t ignore anymore. And I’m really proud of you, Bobby, for actually taking a stand on this because I’ve been very carefully listening to the political narrative for decades, and I’ve never heard any presidential candidate actually talk about these issues. It’s almost like, let’s get some Medicaid for all, or let’s restrict Medicaid, or let’s limit this or limit that, not talking about the real root causes
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: And that debate between Medicaid for all or whether there’s public-private, a public option or a gradual integration or whatever it is. Obamacare, it’s all about moving deck chairs around in the Titanic because the thing that’s driving costs, it’s shifting costs from one person to another, is that who’s going to pay the cost is going to be the doctors who pay the costs. It’s going to be the hospitals who pay the costs. It’s going to be the HMOs, the pharmaceutical companies, the government who’s going to pay it. That’s the only debate that’s going on. And what we should be saying is how do we reduce the cost? So it’s more in line with the healthier countries in the world. We pay $4.3 trillion for healthcare that dwarfs when anybody else pays in the world per capita. We’re paying two or three or four times what other European nations do, and we’re getting worse outcomes.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: I think I read one, there’s many ways of calculating where we are in the world. You say we’re 60th in life expectancy. There’s other indicia that you look at, child infant mortality, maternal mortality, cancer, death, chronic disease. But by one of these reasonable metrics, we’re 79th in the world in healthcare outcomes. We’re behind Mongolia, behind Cuba, we’re behind Costa Rica. And when I was a kid, we had the best healthcare system in the world. People came all over the world to see American doctors, but more importantly, that level of healthcare was available to every class of Americans. So yeah, we have some good specialists here now, but the care that Americans get when they are sick, if they get any at all, is some of the worst in the world. And we have the highest chronic disease burden on earth. Nobody has a chronic disease. And the covid epidemic was really a bellwether for us. It was an eyeopener because we had 16% of the covid deaths in this country. We only have 4.2% of the global population. So why did we have so many covid tests? Well, one was just terrible mismanagement of the covid epidemic, including denying people access to therapeutic drugs that were proven to work, but more importantly, we at the highest chronic disease burden. So CDC says that the average American who died from Covid had 3.8 chronic diseases, and it was the chronic disease that was killing them. That’s right.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Obesity, chronic disease got
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Top, the cliff dangling on top of the cliff, and then Covid stepped on their fingernails and made them fall. They were already hanging off the cliff. And that’s what nobody is explaining to Anthony Fauci, who was running the system for 50 years and ran it in the ground and was getting all these awards for managing covid. He’s never explained how under his watch allergic diseases, which he directly is in charge of, exploded from essentially zero to a large percentage of the American population half of now. And as I said, we spend 4.3 trillion on healthcare in this country. When my uncle was president, 6% of Americans had chronic disease. Now, we don’t know about probably around 60%, which is the number you
Dr. Mark Hyman: Would use. It’s six in 10 or more, and 40% have more than one. It’s a problem.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: But even larger percentage of our healthcare, I think it’s 93% of Medicare costs are chronic disease and something like 85% of Medicaid
Dr. Mark Hyman: Medicare.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: If we can get rid of chronic disease, we can solve our healthcare crisis in this country, which is also the economic crisis. But the second biggest cost to America is the military, which if you include national security and veterans benefits, 1.3 trillion a year. Well, this is 4.3 trillion. So it’s basically more than three times what the military costs. It’s by far the biggest cause we have. If we want to reduce the budget deficit, we got to start with that. But even more important, it’s highly likely and in the next 20 years, we’re going to face some catastrophic crisis in our country. It could be an economic meltdown, it could be a war, it could be environmental injuries, catastrophes, whatever. We’re America. We can weather any kind of storm. We have our entrepreneurial impulses. We have the greatest natural resources in the world. We’ll figure out a way around it, what Franklin Roosevelt called America’s industrial genius. But as long as you’re healthy, we can figure it out. But if you got a chronic disease or if you are caring for a child with full-blown autism, that reduces your productivity to probably 10 or 20% of what it would normally be, and you will not have, you’ll be soul crushed and destroyed. The key is the most important key more than our economy or anything else, is to get Americans healthy again so that we can be resilient and that we can cope with these kinds of crises.
Dr. Mark Hyman: I think you’re right, Bobby. I think you hit the nail on the head in Covid, you mentioned Covid, 63% according to a tough study of deaths and hospitalization from Covid could have been prevented by better diet because diet was driving these chronic diseases. And I think until we really grip take a grip of that fact that food and our food system is driving so many of the things that are wrong with our society, we’re not going to able to get out of this mess. We’re going to be just putting a thumb in different holes in the boat while the boat is sinking or rearranging the Dex year in the Titanic, for example, for every dollar we spent on food, according to Rockefeller Foundation study, there’s $3 in collateral damage to increasing chronic disease burden to the impact on social environments, to the effect on environment biodiversity, our depleted water resources, our soil depletion, the climate change, all these downstream effects because of how we grow food, how we process food, how we market food, distributed food, all those things are things that are not being dealt with as a problem.
Dr. Mark Hyman: They’re just sort of dealing with all the things downstream like we’re doing in medicine. You deal with diabetes or heart disease or autoimmune disease with medication instead of dealing with the root causes. So I’m really so excited to hear you talk about this. I think the only way for America to succeed going forward is that we don’t become burdened from this chronic disease epidemic that will affect every aspect of our ability to function in the world, our productivity. I mean, just when you think about the mental health crisis, I don’t want to talk about this for a minute. I think it’s very connected, and I think that most people don’t understand why we’re seeing such increasing rates of depression, anxiety, suicide, why we’re seeing the increased polarization, divisiveness of society. And I’ve dug into this research quite a lot. I wrote a book about this 15 years ago called The Ultra Mind Solution, which is how our bodies affects our mind and our brains functioning.
Dr. Mark Hyman: And when we are inflamed, literally, and our brains are inflamed at leads to all these things that we’ve been talking about and everything from autism to a ed, to anxiety, depression, and even things like Alzheimer’s. So the brain’s inflammation is what’s driving so many of these brain disorders. And the productivity of people who have depression is the biggest cost. If it was a macroeconomic analysis that was done that showed over the next 35 years, the direct and indirect costs of our healthcare crisis are going to cost $95 trillion, and the bulk of that wasn’t people with diabetes or obesity, actually, it was the mental health crisis. It was depression, which resulted in the indirect cost of lost productivity, which was trillions of dollars a year. So I’d love to talk about this mental health crisis. I sent you a sort of literature review that I did of how our food is affecting our, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on how we begin to deal with this. It’s not just obviously food, but it’s also increasing isolation, loneliness, the endless amount of bad news we’re seeing and other stresses. So how do you begin to think about tackling this mental health crisis?
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Yeah, I mean, and I’ve also read a lot of science on the link between the microbiome and mood and brain and mental health and mental illness. And it’s absolutely, one of the things that I’m doing is one of my kind of Peace Corps initiative is going to be to launch a series of wellness centers in communities all over this country, particularly in rural communities today, rural communities. The biggest industry is often prisons. And prisons is when we get the kids when they’re too late, prison suicide, et cetera. So that’s when it’s too late. What I’m going to do is launch these essentially wellness farms, although I’m doing them in the cities as well. I just toured one the other day in Utah that is just fantastic and so inspiring. But they’re modeled on a program that I saw in Italy that I visited many times.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: It’s called San Banos. And San Patrick Nanos is a farm, 500 acres. It has vineyards, it has a winery where the people who anybody can go there if you’re addicted to drugs or alcohol, and you can go there, you just have to make a five-year commitment, and you go there for free and you learn a trade. So in five years, sounds like a long time, but we send our kids to college for four years, and this is better than college for a lot of kids. There’s no screens there. Oh, there’s no cell phones, there’s no computers. You need, it’s like old school. You need to start talking to other people. And there’s not a big medical infrastructure psychiatrist and everything. It’s really, you get reparented by your peers. There’s codes of conduct and they grow organic food. They very, very good food. They grow their own. Some groups will learn to farm. There’s a dog kennel where people learn to train animals and care for them. There’s a factory for furniture where people learn that trade. There’s an apparel factory, there’s a wallpaper, hand painted wallpaper factory. And these are old artisans
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Who teach people under the medieval futile apprentice system where you apprentice under somebody who’s an accomplished artist. They make purses for La Valley, for Prada, for Gucci. They make some of the best wines in Europe. Their bakery make some of the finest breads in Tuscany. They’re famous there, and it’s all free, and we need to be doing things. You go there, you live in nature, and you get reparented. I was talking the other day to this Olympic skier or snowboarder gold medal, three time Olympian gold medalist, heart bright, and we both came from big families. And we were talking about the fact that if we were left inside with my brothers and sisters, it was like a donnybrook. There’d be fist fights. We had real fist fights when we were my family as on each other.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: As soon as they sent us outside, we’d all be best friends again. And there’s something about nature that that gets you centered and it gets you back in connection with larger concepts, with your spirituality and something peaceful. And we need, and that’s what I hope to do with these arms, put people in nature, give them something. You get esteem, self-esteem by doing esteemable things, but just as importantly, to have them raise their own food, organic food. And Christopher Oliver Anthony who did that famous song about Richmond from Richmond is partnering with me on this. Oh, yeah. And I’m very, very excited about it because we need to start healing this country in so many ways. Not only the political divisions. Our children are in crisis. We lost 110,000 kids last year to drug overdoses. That’s twice that we lost in the 20 year Vietnam War. So there’s a war now on our children, and we made a big investment in these kids.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: We need to get them back. And my program is designed to, instead of making foreign wars, we’re going to bring the kids home. I’m for freedom, mark. So I’m going to lift the federal regulations against sales of marijuana. The states are doing it all anyway. The federal government ought to be able to tax it. And I’m going to use the taxes from sales of marijuana, which is a drug to fund a program to actually heal kids from drug addiction, from alcoholism, from suicide and mental illness. And eating good food is a critical part of that and getting people in the habit of eating good food. And I love what you’re seeing now in Bolivia where you’re seeing those, the color, the color coded food label, so people know I’m eating green, I’m reading, eating red, eating blue, and to give people of all classes, of all languages a comprehensible way of saying, I’m going to only feed my kid the good foods. I’m not going to feed them the bad foods. And it uses the economy to incentivize companies to make food that actually makes you healthier, because there’ll be a, we’re not going to regulate it. They don’t need more regulations in this country, but we’re going to inform the public and then we’re going to use the bully pulpit of the presidency, the moral persuasion of that to tell people, if you’re a mom, your duty, your kid is to feed ’em good food. Don’t feed them the yellow foods. Don’t feed them the red foods.
Dr. Mark Hyman: What do you think, Bobby? Of the marketing of junk food and stuff on TV and also pharma, those are the biggest advertisers on pharma. And I think we’re in New Zealand are the only ones who allow pharmaceutical advertising, I think, which is driving so much of our healthcare issues and also food advertising.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: I’m going to end pharmaceutical advertising on TV with the food advertising what I’d like to do. But this will take
Dr. Mark Hyman: Legislation, have warnings like they do at the end of drug ads, right? This could kill you.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: You eat the fruit loops, you’re poisoning your child. So yeah, warnings, people should have informed choice and they don’t have a choice. They have propaganda. And that’s it essentially is a lie.
Dr. Mark Hyman: It is. And I also think that that’s important for people to understand that so much of behavior is driven through marketing and advertising, whether it’s on TV or online, and it’s much more sophisticated and much more targeted now. And kids are predominantly targeted. I think there are over 5 billion embedded ads and games on Facebook for kids that were actually promoting junk food and processed food today. Our kids’ schools are the biggest fast food system in the country. If you combine McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Subway, our food system schools provides more junk food, all those combined. And it’s really, again, driving so much of our mental health crisis. We didn’t see this when we were kids, Bobby. I didn’t see kids with depression and anxiety and the mass amount of a DD and trouble with school. And the school lunches have really shifted into be basically outlets for fast food companies. How would you begin to think about that? I think that’s contributing both to the poor health as well as the mental health crisis we’re seeing.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: I mean, that’s actually something that the Department of Education has an 80 billion budget, and that’s one of the things that it ought to be doing is to make sure that school lunches are healthy and that the food that we’re giving to kids is directly related to their behavior, to their moods, to their performance in school, and to be able to tell people that you’re much more likely to have kids who are in a learning atmosphere if they’re not pumping up on sugar between and all of these other poisons between classes that are making them behaviorally that are ruining their moods, their behavior, and their learning capacity.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, it was Bobby. There was a school in Washington I heard about that was really interesting. It was a charter school started by a very wealthy guy, and it was really for kids who were underserved, who came from poor socioeconomic environments, who were often going to be more likely to up in jail than go to college. And what they did with these kids was they not only just had a great academic curriculum, but they fed them three meals a day. The kids ate three meals of whole healthy food a day, and these kids did so well. They were going to Harvard, Yale, all Ivy League colleges. They were succeeding. And then all the parents of the wealthier neighborhoods wanted to send their kids to the school, all having such high performance standards on testing. And I think in terms of research, we should be doing that research on what happens when you take school and this one school gets this typical standard school lunches, which is full of junk food and sugar versus a Whole Foods lunch and breakfast and dinner for kids and seeing what the different academic performances is.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Behavioral issues are aggression in schools, what their other issues are on a DD, and allergies and autoimmunity. All these things we’re seeing, it would be such a simple thing to do, but we’ve never done it. We’ve never asked those questions. So I get very excited when I think about you starting to do these things with NIH in the NIH budget and their whole a hundred plus page budget food was only mentioned once, and that was in the context of the Food and Drug Administration, which just makes me kind of crazy. The biggest thing that actually we can do to make the difference in our country’s health.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Yeah, I love that idea. I love the idea of being able to, I mean, to me, mark, as you know, kids are the biggest kids, ought to be the focus of everything in this country. We shouldn’t be talking so much about going to war in Ukraine. 113 billion we’re spending, and we’ve already committed to the Ukraine War and where President Biden wants to bring that up to 200 billion. The entire budget for EPA is 12 billion. The entire budget for the CDC is 12 billion. Imagine if we had that money instead of spending it on weapons and wars and making war in another country. What if we brought it home and made a war on bad health, made that the target and made our children healthy again? How much better off America would really be if we were giving kids three meals a day in school and they were good food and that we had good education? We have education. Let’s apply the market to our education policies as well and allow charter schools like that. If parents want to send their kids to another school, they ought to have a right to have a better school.
Dr. Mark Hyman: There are places where they’re connecting the schools with farms and local rural communities that are grow healthy food. And it’s actually activating rural communities, which are on the decline. They’re struggling. Their farmers are going out of business to becoming bankrupt, their suicides. So creating an agricultural system that’s designed to actually produce better food will also help create all this downstream benefit of improvements in our children’s health, on our health and better quality food. And also restore rural communities economically and socially, and also have downstream consequences for the environment which you’ve been working on your whole life, like better soil and less use of water, and less use of chemicals and better effects on helping carbon capture with the soil, all from actually doing the right thing. Right now, we’re doing all the wrong things and creating all these downstream consequences, and that can be flipped on his head.
Dr. Mark Hyman: And we can actually, I think even activate people to be engaged in farming like Roosevelt did with the New Deal. He had this Conservation Corps and all these people who are underemployed or unemployed and activated them to actually be part of the community. I think Ron Finley did this in LA with the food force where he got where people were homeless or just got out of prison or were prostitutes and started bringing them in and teaching how to Garden Farm in South central la and they’re actually creating amazing amounts of food for their community and doing a lot of things that could be done in actually activating our society to be more engaged and connected to each other.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Well, I agree with that. I’m going to enlarge AmeriCorps to do exactly that, to give kids another option and to go work on farms and grow organic food and care for the elderly and to get outside and do environmental repair and all of the things that actually make people happy.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah. It’s so great, Bobby. So as far as you’ve been sort of on the campaign trail, you’ve been talking about these issues, you also are a symbol of health. When I met you, you were reactive. It was like in your early fifties. Now you’re about to be 70 and you’re always active, but your diet was a bit worse. We fix that up, but now you’re out there pounding the pavement. You’ve got tons of energy. We’re seeing all these Instagram videos of you doing 24 pull-ups, all these pushups and incredible bench presses and leg presses. How do you think about fitness in America and how do you do it for yourself so that you stay committed and engaged? And how has it impacted you?
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: I mean, I have a couple of thoughts on that. I think people need to do what makes them happy, but we all need to stay in good shape. And that’s important for not just ourselves, our individual lives, our satisfaction, our relationships with our family, but it’s also important for our country to reduce the healthcare costs and to make sure that we’re there, that we’re in good shape to serve the public and to serve our community. It’s kind of a social obligation to try to keep yourself in shape, but whether you do that, I do. I do hike. I hike every day. I want to be outside, and that gets me centered. Then I spend a half an hour in the gym every day, and that for me works. But for other people, it may be yoga, it maybe you swimming, it may be running, whatever it is, but you have to be disciplined about it. And discipline is important. It’s how we’re not here to be building a big pile for ourselves. And whoever dies with the most stuff wins. We’re here to build something that’s much more enduring than wealth, and that’s character. And the way that we build character is by making commitments and then keeping them.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: So for me, I don’t like going to the gym. I don’t enjoy it. It’s not something that I look forward to, but I do it every day whether I want to or not, because I made a commitment to myself, and I’m just going to keep that commitment for me, it works to go to limit it to 30, 35 minutes. I can never make the excuse if I had to go for a full hour day. There’s times where I could say, I just can’t do that. You can always find 30 minutes to do something. So I try to, I keep it short, deliberately. I go in, I work really hard for 30 minutes and then I get out and I’ve been able to do that now for two weeks. I’ll be seven years old. So I’ve been able to do it for most of my adult life. I’ve done something like that. But I think for me, look, I have seven kids. I just came back from 10 days of skiing with them and I’m able to generally keep up with them and they’re all very, very good skiers. I’m going to
Dr. Mark Hyman: Go, yeah, I’ve been skiing you guys.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: I’m doing a political trip this week to Hawaii and I’m going to be, my son Finn is going to come with me and we’re going to surf together. So I can do that. I can go hiking every day. I can do, I can play volleyball with them. Some of my kids like to play tennis and I can do that. I can stay on a tennis court with ’em and I can be active and keep up with them and I can go camping. And so I want that in my life. I don’t want to be sitting on a couch for the rest of my life with a remote control in my hand, fighting with my family about what to watch because I want to watch the history show and the nature show and then you want to watch something else. It’s not a good thing for me to be sitting there about, but being outside is and being active for me, it just makes me happy and I want to watch my kids grow up. And that means, and
Dr. Mark Hyman: Also it’s great for helping you with obesity and mental health too, right? So it’s really has so many benefits personally and for your health and for your fitness. And
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: I’ll tell you what, mark, I don’t like eating healthy food. I’m going to tell you I’ve eaten your food. You’re a great cook, but you need, if you don’t have a live-in Cook, a lot of this stuff, I don’t know what it is. I was thinking this before when I was talking to you. Why does this stuff that tastes the best, why is it so bad? Why are Twinkies so bad for you? How did Evolution equip us to crave Twinkies and McDonald’s, French fries and Big Max when they’re so bad for you? I guess
Dr. Mark Hyman: Why? I can tell you why the food industry is designing these foods to be addictive. They talk about the mouthfeel and the bliss point of food and they know actually have tested this looking function rise. So they know how to activate your dopamine centers just like heroin or cocaine or nicotine or alcohol. And they actually now by strict criteria, according to a recent study, 14% of adults and 12% of kids meet the strict criteria for food addiction and leading to all the same symptoms if you had food, alcohol, addiction, and then alcohol addiction is about 14%. So it’s a big issue. And we’re designed evolution from an evolutionary point of view to find and eat as much sweeter sugar things as we can because it makes us store fat and gain weight for the winter. And animals do that, bears do that. I went to Adam, the island in Alaska, and at the beginning of the season, the bears were all eating salmon and protein and fat and they’re not getting that much weight.
Dr. Mark Hyman: And then at the end of the season, they’re eating berries and they gain 500 pounds. They become diabetic and hypertensive, but then they sleep it off. We just keep eating all winter long. And I think our and brains are designed to actually crave those things which are going to make us gain weight, which is a good thing. If there was a time of scarcity and starvation, which is most of how we evolved. But now we have an overabundance of food, we have an overabundance of ultra processed food. And in one study, I dunno if you know about the study from the NIH, they gave people ultra processed foods to eat as much as you want. And they gave people whole food to eat as much you want same people. They did a crossover trial, but when they had the ultra processed food, they ate 500 calories more a day because the body doesn’t register it as being satisfied eating that food.
Dr. Mark Hyman: No one’s going to eat a bag of avocados, but anybody can eat a bag of chips or a bag of Oreo cookies because if the way it affects the brain. So I think this is part of the issue is we have to start to recognize the science behind why these foods are so addictive, why we crave them so much, and to actually start to regulate these things so that we actually educate people about this process, about what’s going on with their brains and why they can’t keep their bodies healthy and why they’re in this vicious spiral. And the ozempic crazy this year has driven me crazy like, well, if we just give everybody ozempic who’s overweight in this country and obese, I mean obese, it’s going to cost almost half of our entire healthcare budget. If we give everybody who’s overweight, it’s going to be far more than the 4.3 trillion that we spend now.
Dr. Mark Hyman: So we have to think about how do we change this? And I love your talking about this, Bobby, because unless we take this as a national emergency, in my view, unless we take this head on, we’re really going to be unable to have a successful future as America, everything else we want to do our success as a country economically, our success as a country to develop science and intellectual endeavors and to make progress is all going to be hampered if our bodies and brains are deteriorating because of what we’re eating and the lack of our overall wellbeing and health.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Yeah, I talked to you about that one time because I was talking about I could take a mason jar, gallon mason jar full of honey and I could eat it and then I could do that every day for the rest of my life. And I said,
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Why did evolution hardwire me to want endless amounts of honey if it’s not good for you? And you said, well, in the wild when we evolved, it was really only available on these rare occasions. When we stumbled on a beehive and brave the bees, there was a huge cost to getting the honey because you had to get stung 500 times. But we did it because it tastes good, it’s worth it. And it’s usually they have that big hive at the end in the autumn, that’s when they’re maxed out on honey production. And that’s when you want to start storing fat for the winter. So that craving was actually serve the biological for the winter
Dr. Mark Hyman: Biological,
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Yeah, it was a good thing. But if honey is available every single day of your life, it’s not going to be good for you. And the same with sugar. The fruits only were bloomed. The only access to sugar was fruit and the fruit only bloomed at the end of the summer when you were storing weight again and you couldn’t get it all year. So it’s okay to crave it all the time because you couldn’t get it. Now that it’s available all the time,
Dr. Mark Hyman: It is a problem. I just came back from Africa, Bobby, I visited the ZA tribe, the hunter gatherers, and 20% of their diet is actually honey, but they’re thin and their fit minimum diabetes. Why? Because they’re eating 150 grams of fiber a day from all the tubers and the roots and all the wild plants they’re eating. We in America eat about eight grams of fiber per day per person, which is nothing. And that fiber is so important for a microbiome. It’s so important for reducing absorption of sugar. And so you can actually eat more sugar, carbohydrates if you have a very high fiber diet. It acts like a sponge. And that’s part of the problem with ultra processed food. There’s no fiber in there. There’s very few nutrients. It’s mostly, I don’t even know what you want to call, I call it Franken foods. And they actually, they’re depleted nutrients and most Americans are nutritionally deficient in omega threes and folate and zinc and magnesium and vitamin D and things that we should be getting from our food, but we don’t.
Dr. Mark Hyman: And so all this creates this dysregulated eating and dysregulated brain chemistry and dysregulated mood, and it’s really not that hard to fix. I’ve seen it over and over in my clinic at Cleveland Clinic in my own practice. I’ve seen it with so many people in my patients, and it doesn’t take that long. And I think people can do a reset and see their bodies change very quickly. And I think we should call in America to do a sugar reset or a 10 day diet reset to actually get people to try it and see what it feels like to just chip their body into a metabolic and brain chemistry state that isn’t hooked into this system. I just came back from 10 days in Amazon with no phone, no computer, no technology, and no wifi, no cell phone EMFs anywhere. And I slept so much better and my brain wasn’t always looking at my phone and in this state that it often is. And I think those kinds of things really are our fixable if we take a stand. And I think I’m wondering, what else do you think for America we could do to make ourselves
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Healthy? Love? I love what you’re saying about the 10 day sugar detox, and I’m going to challenge Americans to do that. That sounds like such a good idea. My uncle, when he was president, he came across a letter from a series of correspondence between the command of the Marine Corps and Franklin Roosevelt, which Franklin Teddy Roosevelt, this like 1903. And Teddy Roosevelt was saying, what is the basic physical requirements for Marine? And the commander of the Marine Corps said they have to be able to walk 50 miles a single day, and I think it was with a 30 pound pack or 40 pound pack. And so my uncle then sent that correspondence to the current commander, the Marine Corps, and he said, can Marines today do that physical accomplishment? And the Marines didn’t have that kind of stricture anymore. And my uncle then challenged the country to do a 50 mile walk. And he came into this cabinet meeting and he said, the cabinet, he said, at least one of you guys has to do the 50 mile walk. And it was clearly intended for my father, who is the youngest ever country my father ended up doing. It was really hard. I ended up doing it when I got out of college. I walked from Boston to Cape Cod.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Amazing.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: It took me 17 and a half hours and I was really, I’m tired, almost crying at the end of that. But I remember I was at Ken David when my father came in from his 50 mile walk. He walked on the CNO canal towpath where the mules used to code it, tow the barges from Washington DC to camp David. And when he came in, he had blisters on his feet and he was the most tired I’ve ever seen him. And I remember my mother massaging his feet. But I liked that kind of challenge. My uncle also did the presidential council on physical fitness. And we, at high school and grade school, we would get prizes for doing a certain amount of pull-ups, certain, I won the President’s prize in physical fitness when I was in fourth or fifth grade. No, maybe it was fifth and sixth grade. And it was a challenge. And he focused on that and got Americans to focus on it. He believed that America, we were the home of the free, the land of the brave. We were supposed to be the toughest people on earth. American wilderness had made us beef jerky tough and now we were all getting soft. And he was really, really distressed at that, this softness that was coming out of Mary. And then if he looked at what we looked like today, it would be he’d considered a national catastrophe.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Bobby, you’re right about this. And I think you’re talking about the Marines and the fitness level. I’m not sure aware of this, but there’s a group of over 700 retired admirals and generals who are talking about our problem of mission readiness in the fact that 70% of military recruits get rejected because they’re overweight or unfit to fight. And then when we had school lunches start, it was because during World War ii, so many kids were malnourished and they couldn’t join the army or the Navy or the military. And so we started school lunches and now those same school lunches are actually making the kids so unhealthy that they can’t actually get in the military. Even if they wanted to, and I don’t if you know this, but we saw 72% more evacuations from Iraq and Afghanistan because of obesity related injuries and problems in military than from more injuries.
Dr. Mark Hyman: That’s just staggering to me. And that was from this report from the retired animals in general. So I think we want to reduce our military, obviously we want to end forever wars. We want to not be constantly building up the military industrial complex, but just that fact alone of what we’re doing to our kids just is staggering. And I think that this physical fitness, health, nutritional fitness is so important and it’s got to be something that is essential part of our strategy as a nation going forward to actually do whatever else you want to do. We can’t be a successful nation if we’re all going downhill.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Yeah. Well, I’m going to get the country back in shape again. That’s what I’m
Dr. Mark Hyman: Going to fitness challenge in a diet challenge. The sugar challenge. I like that.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Yeah. We’ll do a diet challenge, all of these toxic exposures that are destroying the health of our kids. I’m going to do everything I can to eliminate ’em, and I’m going to do it. I might not be able to get every single one of ’em, but I’m going to start down that path and I’m going to eliminate a lot of ’em. We’re going to have a healthier population very soon after I take the Oval Office.
Dr. Mark Hyman: That’s great. I know we talked about this, but I’m going to put a link in the show notes to how people can get a chance to take a hike with you and I up in the hills of Los Angeles near our house, which was so fun. And we do that a lot when I come to la. So I think we’re going to try to get people involved and connected and understanding why it’s important to support these kinds of ideas and the political discourse that we’re not seeing anywhere else. So Bobby, thanks for your dedication to making America healthy, for making America really an incredible nation again, and stop this slide into what feels like our decline of the American dream. So thank you for just being so dedicated. I encourage everybody to check out Bobby’s website, Kennedy 20 four.com. See his campaign platforms. It’s not just health. It’s many, many other things. And don’t listen to what you hear in the news. Do your own homework. Listen to what he says, read what he’s talking about. And I think very few people out there are willing to take on what he’s taking on in terms of the thinking that needs to be done to change our government in a way that actually brings us forward to a healthier and happier future. So any last thoughts or words, Bobby?
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: No. But thank you very much, mark. And thanks for being a champion.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Well, I could be your birthday in a couple of weeks. I’m going to be in trekking in Patagonia near where we were rafting. I wish I
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Was treking with you in Patagonia.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, time more fun than a big birthday party inside, right? And definitely we’ll keep people up to date. We might have you back on the podcast and talk about things as we go forward. But it’s been great having you, and thanks for keeping up the work you’re doing to educate America, but what we need you to go forward to be a healthier, happy nation.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Thank you very much, mark. Thanks for everything you do to educate the public and to get us out here.
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Speaker 3: This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health, where I’m an Chief medical Officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guest opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only. It’s not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you’re looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. Now, if you’re looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It’s important that you have someone in your corner who is trained, who’s a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Coming up on this week’s episode of the Doctor’s Farmacy,
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: We know it’s not genes. Genes do not cause epidemics. They can provide a vulnerability, but you need an environmental toxin. Our kids didn’t suddenly get lazy. We are mass poisoning our children.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Welcome to the Doctor’s Pharmacy. I’m Dr. Mark Hyman, and this is a place for conversations that matter. Now. Americans are sicker than ever, and it’s not only resulting in poor, physical, and mental health. It’s impacting our economy, our environment, our children’s future, and even our national security. So today I’m talking about how we got here and what’s needed to turn things around with. My friend, activist and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Is an independent candidate for the president of the United States. He’s the founder of the Waterkeeper Alliance, the world’s largest clean water advocacy group, and served as its longtime chairman and attorney. He then went on and found the children’s health defense where he served as chairman and chief litigation counsel in his campaign to adjust childhood chronic disease and toxic exposures. He was also on the team that prosecuted and won the case against Monsanto for glyphosate’s role in causing cancer as president.
Dr. Mark Hyman: He promises to restore the middle class, to unwind the war machine, unravel corporate capture and the chronic disease epidemic, which I care a lot about. Secure the border, protect our wild places, improve the quality of the water we drink, and the air we breathe, heal the divide, fix our public education system, take care of our veterans, support the trade, and make homes affordable again. He also promises to support regenerative farming and other key priorities. So I encourage you to learn more about him by visiting Kennedy 20 four.com. Now, while I’m not endorsing any particular candidate, I was interested to talk to Bobby because he’s one of the only candidates I’m aware of who recognizes how making Americans healthier, we’ll fix so many of the issues we’re facing today. Bobby shares from his perspective that we are mass poisoning our children and why we need to get more information out to people about this.
Dr. Mark Hyman: We discuss how corporate capture in the public and private sectors is keeping America sick. And Bobby talks about how we can begin to reduce healthcare costs and improve health outcomes across the country. We also identify why America experienced such a high death rate from COVID-19, and how ultra processed food is not only making us sick physically, but it’s also making us more anxious, more depressed, and more inflamed. We talk about why it is that we crave food, it’s so bad for us and how we can end our sugar addictions and move toward better health and more. Now let’s dive into my conversation with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Hey, Bobby, it’s great to see you again. How are you doing?
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Hey Mark, where are you?
Dr. Mark Hyman: I’m in La Paz in Bolivia, 13,000 feet. So hopefully I’m had of auction in my brain to do this conversation. We just came out of the Amazon and I’ve been down to Chile with you.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: I think I talked to you about that before that I, because you and I visited Peru together, but I had lived my senior year in high school for half the year I lived in ve, which is up in the Altiplano in Peru with Indian Tribe, the I Mars, and it was 14,000 feet. And it really does a lot of weird things to your body and you’re everything.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Well, hopefully I’m in a box, have this conversation, but wanted to talk about your position on health. You’re one of the few candidates out there, and the presidential race is probably the only one who’s focused on improving the Health of America by not just having access to healthcare, which we all have, but really addressing the root causes of why our healthcare system is so screwed up, why America is so sick, why we’re so overweight, and what we can do about it. So I’m excited to talk to you about a lot of this because we’ve together done a lot of physical activity. We’ve rafted down rivers, we’ve hiked mountains, we’ve done a lot of fun stuff, and we’re always doing active things. And fitness is a really key part of your life and your work, and it’s actually how you maintain, I think, your energy on the campaign trail.
Dr. Mark Hyman: So I want to start by laying out a little bit of the landscape of what we’re facing and why we really need to double down on our thinking about the health of America, which really affects our global standing in the world, our economic competitiveness, our productivity. And right now we’re screwed. I would say we’re seeing 75% of Americans overweight. 45% of kids go according to new data. 93.2% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy, which means they have either their high blood sugar, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, or overweight or have had a heart attack or stroke. Six in 10 Americans have a chronic disease, a large part, this is due the explosion of ultra processed food over the last 20, 30 years that drives poor metabolic health. It’s also affecting our mental health crisis, increasing a lot of our depression, anxiety, polarization, violence, aggression, all because of the food we’re eating and the cost is staggering.
Dr. Mark Hyman: As president, you have to deal with our budget and $4.3 trillion are spent every year on healthcare now one in $5 in our economy, and at least also huge amounts of low productivity with billions of dollars a year in loss productivity. And what’s really frightening, Bobby, is there are life expectancy going down with the largest year over year drop in the last two years in our history, which is far below all other nations, and we’re more than 60 on the list of life expectancy in the world. And what’s really also, as I began to look at this data, it was really interesting. We have a wealth gap in this country, right? 39% increase since 1980, meaning the rich and the poor have about a 39% spread since 1980, but the death gap has increased 570% since 1980, and it’s worse in the south and the Midwest, which are mostly red states because of increasing rates of diabetes and obesity.
Dr. Mark Hyman: And our government policies don’t address this. In 2021, the GAO, the government accountability report on chronic disease and nutrition found over 200 policies, 21 agencies on nutrition, working mostly across purposes, making America sicker and increasing healthcare costs. On one hand, we say with the dietary guidelines, don’t eat sugar and reduce your intake of all that. And on the other hand, with our SNAP or food stamp program, 75% of the food is processed ultra processed food, 10% is soda, meaning $10 billion year own soda. So we’re in this situation where even the FDA Commissioner Robert K has said, our life expectancy’s going the wrong way. We’re the top health officials in the country. We don’t fix it. Who? Well, and you also talked about this. You were quoted in the Washington Post where you said if we had a regulatory agencies that were interested in action looking at data, we’ll be trying to figure out why all cores, mortality for Americans has increased and they’re not covid deaths. So we don’t really have a healthcare system. We have a sick care system. And those who profit most big ag, big food, big pharma, they just perpetuate that system that benefits from chronic disease, which is horrible. So would you consider this a national emergency? And as president, how would you begin to really address this problem?
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Yeah, this is one of the reasons, the key reasons that I ran for President Mark to end this chronic disease epidemic and to restore Americans to good health. When my uncle was president in 1960, if you go back and look at his speeches and his thoughts back then, and he was extraordinarily distressed at that point that we were losing to Europeans. And if he could look at Americans today, he would be in shock because we are so sick. As you say, the obesity during his, when he was in office, obesity was at 13%. Today it’s at 42%, 45%. Now, 75% of Americans are overweight. When he was in office, 6% of Americans had chronic disease by 19 86, 11 0.8%. So it had doubled between 1960 and 1986. It’s 26 years. By 2006, it was at 54%. And we don’t really know what the numbers are right now because of the, I would say purposeful data chaos that comes out of NIH, that they will not give us straight ways of measuring baselines of understanding why health, why public health is declining so precipitously in our country. And it’s clearly, these are epidemics. The epidemics, we’re seeing epidemics of all these chronic diseases, not only obesity, neurological disease, A-D-D-A-D-H-D, speech delay, language delay, tics, Tourette syndrome, narcolepsy, a SD, autism, all of these diseases that you and I never heard of when we were kids,
Dr. Mark Hyman: There was that one troubled kid to class and now it’s like half the class,
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Right? Yeah. I mean, autism’s gone and one in 10,000 in my generation. So the 70-year-old men, one in 10,000, have full-blown autism. And by that I mean nonverbal non toilet train, stemming toe walking, hand flapping. You don’t see the people like that my age. But one in every, according to the CDC one in every 34 kids looks like that. What’s happening, one in 22 boys. Then we have the autoimmune diseases. It suddenly blew up in the early nineties, juvenile diabetes, which I never saw when I was a kid, rheumatoid arthritis and all these exotic disease like Crohn’s disease, lupus, and then the allergic diseases that suddenly appeared at the same time in the mid nineties. Peanut allergies, food, I had anaphylaxis, eczema, whoever heard of eczema, nobody. And now all these kids have it. They’re all scratching. They all have the rashes and they’re all medicated.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: They’re taking Adderall, they’re taking antidepressants, they’re taking Ritalin. They’ve got their albuterol and inhalers in every classroom. They’ve got EpiPens in every classroom. And there’s a study then that Congress asked EPA to do, and EPA is captured agency, but it’s captured not by the pharmaceutical industry. And it’s not really heavily captured by the agricultural industry because it doesn’t really directly regulate those. It is captured by oil, oil and coal and gas and chemical. But Congress said to EPA tell us what year the autism epidemic began. So EPA actually did a real study with real science, and the scientists came back and said 1989. Now it was the change year. So the challenge is, and if you look at all of these diseases, they follow kind of that same timeline. So what happened in 1989, what happened in the early nineties? We know it’s not genes. Genes do not cause epidemics. They can provide a vulnerability, but you need an environmental toxin. Our kids didn’t suddenly get lazy. We are mass poisoning our children. And so you have to figure out a toxin that was introduced and became ubiquitous in 1989, the mid nineties. And that affects every demographic from Cubans and Ki Bisque to the Inuit in Alaska and Homer Alaska. And there aren’t that many candidates. One of them is high fructose corn syrup. Clearly all these processed foods that my generation began eating, I mean, we were eating hostess s Twinki. By the way, I
Dr. Mark Hyman: Like hostess cupcakes. I used to go to the corner store in Queens and get them.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: I wish I had a dollar for every one of those that I ate before I met you. Of course I’d still eat them if I could.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Well, you’re good. You listened to me, Bobby, you stopped drinking soda. You did a good job. You got fitter. Actually, since I met you 15 years ago, you actually are fitter and better shape than you were back then. It’s impressive.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: I was drinking nine cokes a day. I actually, I have this app called Days, I’ll show you that. It says 3057 days without a Coke, without any soda.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, that’s amazing. That’s about how long I’ve known you a little bit more. It took me a while to get you convinced.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: That’s almost 10 years. And I was drinking a lot of Coke. I was drinking like eight or nine cokes a day.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, so you’re right, Bobby. The ultra processed food is a huge issue and it’s exploded in the last decades, and it’s really been one of those inciting factors that’s driven our epidemic. And I think we’re looking for a smoking gun, by the way.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: This is ID with no sugar in it. There you
Dr. Mark Hyman: Go. Thanks, Bobby. But we really have, smoking is an easy, literally smoking gun and it’s linked to lung cancer. And so in food, it’s been very difficult. Like what food should it be packed, sugar or salt? But I think that what we’re coming to understand in science, and there’s a huge body of evidence now that supports this is an ultra processed food, which is really defined by this Nova classification that degrades food on how processed it is. Like tomato can is processed, but it’s minimally processed. Whereas Twinkie is extremely processed and it’s made up of deconstructed food ingredients that are originally food. But then they deconstructed into these molecular science projects and they reassemble ’em. It looked like something you could eat, but they’re not really food by definition. And that has been driving the epidemic of obesity, diabetes, all these chronic illnesses that destroys our gut microbiome.
Dr. Mark Hyman: It drives inflammation, it affects mental health, and it’s linked to depression, suicide, violence. It’s quite interesting. And it also has increased in mortality for every 10% of your diet. That’s ultra processed food. Your risk of death goes up by 14%. And it’s 60 plus percent of our diet is adults and 67% of kids’ diets. And I think, how would you think about addressing this as president? Because in my view, we’re seeing a slow moving tsunami. We’re all getting our suntan on the beach, and this is coming at us so fast. We’re really now going to see in the next generation the serious consequences because our kids, like you mentioned, are all coming into adulthood, sick and overweight and on lots of medications.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Yeah. My inclination is that is to give people good information and at the same time maximize freedom. So I wouldn’t tell people what to eat and what not to eat, but what I would tell people is I’m going to take the NIH and bring it back to its original mission. And let me explain that. When I was a little kid, NIH was the gold standard scientific agency on earth, just like NASA was for space. When I was a little boy, we lived in McLean, which is only a few minutes from Bethesda, Maryland. And my mother had an assistant who worked for her whose husband was a scientist at IH. I used to go down to NIH because I was fascinated by science. And I would go and look at the Guinea pigs and the rats and the mice and all the things they were doing.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: And during that period, mark, there were a lot of new countries that were beginning. There were 122 new nations that began after World War ii. And a lot of ’em were African and colonial nations that got their sovereignty. They didn’t have the money to have a real scientific agency. So a lot of them in their constitutions and their statutory framework would say, if FDA approves it, if NIH says it’s true, then we will consider it true. So they didn’t even have their agencies, but they relied on ours because everybody trusted American science. And then something happened to NIH and a whole bunch of, there was a lot of corporate capture, all these mechanisms of corporate capture. But most importantly, in 1980, the by Dole Act was passed, and that act gave NIH and NIH individual scientists the rights to collect royalties on any drug that they worked on. So for example, today the Moderna vaccine was produced by NIH and it’s made tens of billions of dollars. Well, half that money will go to NIH,
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: And some of that money goes to scientists who work in, there’s six scientists who get to collect $150,000 a year forever. Well, of course, if you have those kind of perverse economic incentives and conflicts of Pinterest, it is going to subsume the regulatory function and beneath the kind of mercantile ambitions of those individuals who can make a lot of money, if you’re paying for your boat and your alimony and your house and your children’s education, a drug that you’re supposed to be regulating, you may turn a blind eye to some of the problems with that drug and you may do everything you can to get it through the regulatory process and get it mandated. And that’s what’s happened. But not only that, the entire function of NIH has changed so that I think it was 2016 or 2017 when I actually did this calculation, there was 220 new drugs approved by FDA and all of them had come from NIH.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: So NIH is now the biggest incubator of pharmaceutical products. And what’s happened is they’re no longer doing what they’re supposed to be doing, which is to answer the question, why do we have an autism epidemic? Why do we have an obesity epidemic? It’s pretty easy to figure out. There’s only a certain number of suspects. You have processed foods, the pfoa, you have OID pesticides, atrazine, glyphosate, cell phone radiation. There’s a limited universe and you can figure out pretty easily which ones are causing which effects, and it’s probably cumulative. So they’re all probably working on similar biological pathways and earning our kids. You can figure out that too. NIH does not do that science. In fact, if you try to do that science, let’s say you’re a university young associate professor at Stanford and you say, Hey, you know what? I have access to the vaccine. I have access to the California or the Florida healthcare records, so I can look at exposures that people made and then subsequent medical claims, whether it’s vaccines or your food diet, you can look at all that. I’m going to study and find out why do we have an autism epidemic? Why do we have an obesity epidemic? If you try to do those studies, you could easily jeopardize your job in your future. We
Dr. Mark Hyman: Call the NIH, the National Institute of Health, but it’s not really it’s diseases and it’s focused not on the root causes, which is really unfortunate.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: So what I’m going to do is I’m going to go down to NIH during my first week in office and I’m going to assemble all the division chairs and the branch chairs, and I am going to say to them, we’re going to do something different. We have a NIH as a $42 billion annual budget. It distributes that money to 56,000 scientists mainly at universities to develop new drugs and to do studies. And I’m going to say we are going to make it our priority now as fast as possible to fund studies that are going to tell us what’s causing this epidemic. And then I’m going to get those studies funded and I’m going to get them underway every way of looking at ’em. I’m also going to call in all the scientific journals into the Justice Department, and I’m going to say to them, you’ve been serving the entrant. You’ve been lying to the public. You are representing yourself as a neutral and reliable source of health information. And you have done tremendous damage to public health because you are not that you are publishing thing. You are publishing fake science that is designed to promote the Arkansas ambitions of the pharmaceutical industry and of the food industry, of the big agricultural interests of the oil and gas and coal and all these other big powerful industries.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: And you are lying to the public and you’ve caused tremendous damage to public health. And I’m going to hold you irresponsible. I’m going to litigate against you under the racketeering laws, under the general tort laws. I’m going to find a way to sue you unless you come up with a plan right now to show how you’re going to start publishing real science and stop retracting the real science and publishing the fake pharmaceutical science by these phony industry mercenaries, scientists that we call biostitutes. That’s what they publish in the New England Journal of Medicine. The land said Eat biopharma, all of these other big publications, Elsevier, and I’m going to straighten that out so that people can actually get real information. The other thing that that’s going to do, mark, is it will give the attorneys a chance to litigate these issues in court because there’s no good science on these issues.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: You can’t sue a company for making your children fat for poisoning them so that their microbiome doesn’t work anymore. Once you create that science, once you have 15 or 20 studies that show that, then those kinds of suits become possible. And that’s how you really change policy. Just like we did with the Monsanto case, critical threat, we got a critical threshold of studies and animal studies, observational studies, epidemiological studies, bench studies that showed that glyphosate was causing non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in Roundup. And before that, if you were the president of the United States and you tried about a ban roundup, you would go nowhere. It doesn’t matter who you’re, but if you have enough science to get past the DALBERT threshold, which is a threshold in federal courts where the judge has to make an independent judgment at their sufficient science critical mass of science, 15, 20, 25 studies out there that show the link between this exposure and this illness that’s called Albert, and the judge is not allowed to send it to a jury until you have that package of science. And if what I’m going to do, I’m going to provide that enough science, sufficient science on each one of these exposures and each one of these injuries to show who’s causing what and all the responsible in court.
Dr. Mark Hyman: I think that’s so important, Bobby, because this has been so neglected in the national of health budget. There’s really almost nothing for nutrition research, which is the biggest driver of so much of the things we’re talking about, the chronic illness, the obesity, the diabetes, the mental health crisis, and yet there are other issues. You mentioned environmental chemicals, various kinds of stresses and so forth that are there, things like glyphosate affecting your microbiome. But the ultra processed food is something that we really haven’t doubled down and studied, and it’s driving all the other diseases. So at the NIH, they study cancer and they give you 6 billion for that or heart disease or diabetes, but they’re not studying the root causes. And I think in medicine, we’re really so focused on the downstream things that we can treat with the medication rather than the upstream root causes.
Dr. Mark Hyman: And it’s going to require a fairly rigorous approach looking at one, the science, and two, why are we actually promoting policies even with the science that we have now, which shows the damage of ultra processed food where we’re paying have a hundred billion a year SNAP bill, which is a food stamp that most of that is for junk food and ultra processed food, which we know is killing people and 10% of soda, then we’re paying for that on the back end with Medicaid and Medicare for all the chronic disease. We’re also seeing the challenges of the capture, not just the agencies like the FDA and the USCA and HHS and EPA and CDC, but also Congress. I sat down with a congressman the other day who I got excited about what I was talking about. I met with them about our food fix campaign to try to transform our food system and actually have reimbursement for nutrition and healthcare and many other efforts.
Dr. Mark Hyman: And he lost 25 pounds by following the suggestions I made. He cut down sugar. I said, why don’t we do a sugar detox for cotton? He goes, well, I can’t really do that. I’m on the Candy Caucus. And I’m like, oh my God. Everybody is unwilling to actually step up and do the right thing because of this. And I wonder how we begin to address this corporate capture because we have all the agencies not coordinated around food. We have all these things siloed. It’s affecting every area of our society, and we’re dealing with all things separately like we’re dealing with the issue of chronic disease and with medication or ozempic for obesity. We’re dealing with the economic budget deficit and our national debt by talking about how we cut spending and increase taxes and all these things without talking about why we’re having this right. One to $5 of our economy is from chronic disease, mostly preventable through lifestyle. We have to start with those root cost things and address this. So how would you think about dealing with this corporate capture process which is affecting our health and our healthcare?
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Well, I mean, I think there’s a number of ways to deal with it. One is what I said before is to make sure they’re producing good science and then you have a market response. Once you get good information to the public, you can have a market response to bad food to bad to help people. You’re not helping it to tell mothers you’re not helping your mother, your children feed them fruit loops. You are not doing what a parent ought to do to give your kids dies and sugar a mixture of dyes and sugar and high fructose corn syrup.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, right now I’m in South America, Bobby and all the labels on the foods, they’re all clear. Green is good for you. Yellow caution red, this is bad for you. And anybody can understand that even if you have no education with currently, our FDA labeling is so confusing. You have to be a nutrition PhD to understand it, and even then you can’t really get it. So we have to change labeling. We have to change marketing. We have to change research infrastructure. We have to change how we’re reimbursing healthcare services to incentivize doctors and healthcare providers to provide nutrition services, deal with the root causes. And right now we don’t do that. You can get paid for doing a stent, but you can’t pay for doing an intensive lifestyle care program like we do at Cleveland Clinic where we’re reversing diabetes, reversing heart disease, reversing these chronic illnesses using food as medicine. So it seems to be one of the central things that we can do to radically shift our trajectory in America, which is like I said, where I think 60th or worse in our life expectancy despite spending twice as much as any other nation on healthcare.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: And then the other thing I’m going to do is just to change the corporate culture at these agencies, and that is going to require a president who actually understands how the agencies work. I’ve litigated against almost all these agencies against N-I-H-C-D-C-F-D-A-E-P-A-F-C-C. I recently won a case against FCC in the Federal Court of appeals lying to the public about cell phone radiation. I’m involved in litigation right now involving ddo DOT Department of Transportation because I’m representing a thousand families in East Ade Ohio whose lives were appended by the Norfolk Southern people. All of these problems and all of these agencies are coming from corporate capture and I know how to unravel it. I know in many of these agencies who the individuals are, I can name them off the top of my head, who are putting corporate capture on the steroids. I understand the perverse incentives that also amplify corporate capture.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Why does FDA get 50% of its budget from pharmaceutical companies? Why can NIH scientists get royalties on the products they’re supposed to be regulating? Why does NIH get royalties on products? It’s supposed to be refining problems with, it’s a bribery, it’s an eternal loop of bribery, of corrupt bribery. And I’m going to go to these agencies, I’m going to pick people instead of picking like Donald Trump promised that he would unravel the swamp, but then he appoints John Bolton to head NSA, who is the face of the military industrial complex. He appoints Scott Gottlieb, who’s a business partner of Pfizer to run FDA, and
Dr. Mark Hyman: Then he went back to work for Pfizer afterwards. Yeah,
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: FDA does an $88 billion under him for Pfizer, and then he goes back to work for Pfizer again. So it’s Alex Azar is another lobbyist from the pharmaceutical industry who gets appointed to the head of NIH. And if you look at all of the regulatory agencies, they were all being run by people who were within those industries. And I’m not going to do that. I’m going to bring people of integrity into government who will change the culture of those agencies and reward the branch and division chairs that actually are doing public health and get rid of, I’m going to change some. The policies about the remote that allows these, I think the last six FDA chiefs have gone to work for pharmaceutical companies within a year of leaving the FDA, I don’t know exactly.
Dr. Mark Hyman: It shouldn’t be called the FDA Bobby because it should be called the Federal Drug Administration, not the Food and Drug Administration, because 7% of the budget is on food, 93% is on pharma and food safety is what they’re looking at, which is whether you get salmonella or food poisoning. And that’s about 2,400 people dying a year. We have more than that dying every day from eating our, what we call a standard American diet or sad diet or ultra processed diet. And they’re not doing anything about that. The labeling is horrible. The regulation of chemicals and food, ultra processed food is not there. We have the data and they’re not acting on it. And for me as a doctor, seeing these people in my office, and I’ve been a doctor for over 30 years now, and in my own career, my own life, I’ve seen this explosion of these diseases that you mentioned at the onset of the podcast from all the obesity and metabolic diseases to the environmentally related diseases, neurogenerative diseases, neurodevelopmental diseases, autoimmune inflammatory diseases.
Dr. Mark Hyman: These are things that didn’t exist at their volume that we have now. And the FDA is really not addressing this, and our n NIH is not addressing this, and our healthcare system itself is incentivized to actually make more money doing more stuff rather than making people healthier. I mean, imagine if you had a car that you drove off a lot and you had to pay for the car and it didn’t work after you drove it off the lot. That’s essentially what we do with our current healthcare system. We don’t pay for results and outcomes. We pay for doing more stuff, more surgeries, more medications, more doctor’s visits, more hospitalizations, and that’s got to change.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: You know what? Another thing that we can do is, and I’m saying this with a due concern for privacy or individual privacy, but you can depersonalize medical records and digitalize, a lot of them are digitalized anyway. Once they’re digitalized, you can do a medical informatics system that essentially is constantly doing epidemiological studies on every drug and comparing one diabetes drug outcome to another diabetes drug outcome and then saying, we’re only going to pay for the one where we maximize the bank for buck. And none of that happens. There’s none of those kind of everything. Everybody is the mercy of the pharmaceutical reps. The doctors are prescribing what they tell ’em to prescribe, and the public is at the mercy of an FDA that is owned. The FDA is just a stock puppet. The industry isn’t supposed to regulate. And all of this is easily changed. I’m not saying I’m going to be able to accomplish it all on day one, but I’m going to accomplish it very quickly. And what I’ve said to people, if I haven’t dramatically reduced the occurrence of chronic disease in children by my third year in office that people shouldn’t vote for me again, I’m that confident that I’m going to be able to change this.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, it’s true. It’s not a lack of knowledge or knowing what to do. It’s really a lack of the political will, a lack of the right incentives in business, a lack of awareness and education in the public. And we can do that. And we’ve done it before with smoking and other campaigns that have been effective in reducing that. And I think, I don’t know if it’s going to require litigation against some of these corporations that are doing harmful things. I think no one intends to, but the downstream consequences, unintended consequences of this ultra processed food explosion is something we can’t ignore anymore. And I’m really proud of you, Bobby, for actually taking a stand on this because I’ve been very carefully listening to the political narrative for decades, and I’ve never heard any presidential candidate actually talk about these issues. It’s almost like, let’s get some Medicaid for all, or let’s restrict Medicaid, or let’s limit this or limit that, not talking about the real root causes
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: And that debate between Medicaid for all or whether there’s public-private, a public option or a gradual integration or whatever it is. Obamacare, it’s all about moving deck chairs around in the Titanic because the thing that’s driving costs, it’s shifting costs from one person to another, is that who’s going to pay the cost is going to be the doctors who pay the costs. It’s going to be the hospitals who pay the costs. It’s going to be the HMOs, the pharmaceutical companies, the government who’s going to pay it. That’s the only debate that’s going on. And what we should be saying is how do we reduce the cost? So it’s more in line with the healthier countries in the world. We pay $4.3 trillion for healthcare that dwarfs when anybody else pays in the world per capita. We’re paying two or three or four times what other European nations do, and we’re getting worse outcomes.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: I think I read one, there’s many ways of calculating where we are in the world. You say we’re 60th in life expectancy. There’s other indicia that you look at, child infant mortality, maternal mortality, cancer, death, chronic disease. But by one of these reasonable metrics, we’re 79th in the world in healthcare outcomes. We’re behind Mongolia, behind Cuba, we’re behind Costa Rica. And when I was a kid, we had the best healthcare system in the world. People came all over the world to see American doctors, but more importantly, that level of healthcare was available to every class of Americans. So yeah, we have some good specialists here now, but the care that Americans get when they are sick, if they get any at all, is some of the worst in the world. And we have the highest chronic disease burden on earth. Nobody has a chronic disease. And the covid epidemic was really a bellwether for us. It was an eyeopener because we had 16% of the covid deaths in this country. We only have 4.2% of the global population. So why did we have so many covid tests? Well, one was just terrible mismanagement of the covid epidemic, including denying people access to therapeutic drugs that were proven to work, but more importantly, we at the highest chronic disease burden. So CDC says that the average American who died from Covid had 3.8 chronic diseases, and it was the chronic disease that was killing them. That’s right.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Obesity, chronic disease got
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Top, the cliff dangling on top of the cliff, and then Covid stepped on their fingernails and made them fall. They were already hanging off the cliff. And that’s what nobody is explaining to Anthony Fauci, who was running the system for 50 years and ran it in the ground and was getting all these awards for managing covid. He’s never explained how under his watch allergic diseases, which he directly is in charge of, exploded from essentially zero to a large percentage of the American population half of now. And as I said, we spend 4.3 trillion on healthcare in this country. When my uncle was president, 6% of Americans had chronic disease. Now, we don’t know about probably around 60%, which is the number you
Dr. Mark Hyman: Would use. It’s six in 10 or more, and 40% have more than one. It’s a problem.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: But even larger percentage of our healthcare, I think it’s 93% of Medicare costs are chronic disease and something like 85% of Medicaid
Dr. Mark Hyman: Medicare.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: If we can get rid of chronic disease, we can solve our healthcare crisis in this country, which is also the economic crisis. But the second biggest cost to America is the military, which if you include national security and veterans benefits, 1.3 trillion a year. Well, this is 4.3 trillion. So it’s basically more than three times what the military costs. It’s by far the biggest cause we have. If we want to reduce the budget deficit, we got to start with that. But even more important, it’s highly likely and in the next 20 years, we’re going to face some catastrophic crisis in our country. It could be an economic meltdown, it could be a war, it could be environmental injuries, catastrophes, whatever. We’re America. We can weather any kind of storm. We have our entrepreneurial impulses. We have the greatest natural resources in the world. We’ll figure out a way around it, what Franklin Roosevelt called America’s industrial genius. But as long as you’re healthy, we can figure it out. But if you got a chronic disease or if you are caring for a child with full-blown autism, that reduces your productivity to probably 10 or 20% of what it would normally be, and you will not have, you’ll be soul crushed and destroyed. The key is the most important key more than our economy or anything else, is to get Americans healthy again so that we can be resilient and that we can cope with these kinds of crises.
Dr. Mark Hyman: I think you’re right, Bobby. I think you hit the nail on the head in Covid, you mentioned Covid, 63% according to a tough study of deaths and hospitalization from Covid could have been prevented by better diet because diet was driving these chronic diseases. And I think until we really grip take a grip of that fact that food and our food system is driving so many of the things that are wrong with our society, we’re not going to able to get out of this mess. We’re going to be just putting a thumb in different holes in the boat while the boat is sinking or rearranging the Dex year in the Titanic, for example, for every dollar we spent on food, according to Rockefeller Foundation study, there’s $3 in collateral damage to increasing chronic disease burden to the impact on social environments, to the effect on environment biodiversity, our depleted water resources, our soil depletion, the climate change, all these downstream effects because of how we grow food, how we process food, how we market food, distributed food, all those things are things that are not being dealt with as a problem.
Dr. Mark Hyman: They’re just sort of dealing with all the things downstream like we’re doing in medicine. You deal with diabetes or heart disease or autoimmune disease with medication instead of dealing with the root causes. So I’m really so excited to hear you talk about this. I think the only way for America to succeed going forward is that we don’t become burdened from this chronic disease epidemic that will affect every aspect of our ability to function in the world, our productivity. I mean, just when you think about the mental health crisis, I don’t want to talk about this for a minute. I think it’s very connected, and I think that most people don’t understand why we’re seeing such increasing rates of depression, anxiety, suicide, why we’re seeing the increased polarization, divisiveness of society. And I’ve dug into this research quite a lot. I wrote a book about this 15 years ago called The Ultra Mind Solution, which is how our bodies affects our mind and our brains functioning.
Dr. Mark Hyman: And when we are inflamed, literally, and our brains are inflamed at leads to all these things that we’ve been talking about and everything from autism to a ed, to anxiety, depression, and even things like Alzheimer’s. So the brain’s inflammation is what’s driving so many of these brain disorders. And the productivity of people who have depression is the biggest cost. If it was a macroeconomic analysis that was done that showed over the next 35 years, the direct and indirect costs of our healthcare crisis are going to cost $95 trillion, and the bulk of that wasn’t people with diabetes or obesity, actually, it was the mental health crisis. It was depression, which resulted in the indirect cost of lost productivity, which was trillions of dollars a year. So I’d love to talk about this mental health crisis. I sent you a sort of literature review that I did of how our food is affecting our, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on how we begin to deal with this. It’s not just obviously food, but it’s also increasing isolation, loneliness, the endless amount of bad news we’re seeing and other stresses. So how do you begin to think about tackling this mental health crisis?
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Yeah, I mean, and I’ve also read a lot of science on the link between the microbiome and mood and brain and mental health and mental illness. And it’s absolutely, one of the things that I’m doing is one of my kind of Peace Corps initiative is going to be to launch a series of wellness centers in communities all over this country, particularly in rural communities today, rural communities. The biggest industry is often prisons. And prisons is when we get the kids when they’re too late, prison suicide, et cetera. So that’s when it’s too late. What I’m going to do is launch these essentially wellness farms, although I’m doing them in the cities as well. I just toured one the other day in Utah that is just fantastic and so inspiring. But they’re modeled on a program that I saw in Italy that I visited many times.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: It’s called San Banos. And San Patrick Nanos is a farm, 500 acres. It has vineyards, it has a winery where the people who anybody can go there if you’re addicted to drugs or alcohol, and you can go there, you just have to make a five-year commitment, and you go there for free and you learn a trade. So in five years, sounds like a long time, but we send our kids to college for four years, and this is better than college for a lot of kids. There’s no screens there. Oh, there’s no cell phones, there’s no computers. You need, it’s like old school. You need to start talking to other people. And there’s not a big medical infrastructure psychiatrist and everything. It’s really, you get reparented by your peers. There’s codes of conduct and they grow organic food. They very, very good food. They grow their own. Some groups will learn to farm. There’s a dog kennel where people learn to train animals and care for them. There’s a factory for furniture where people learn that trade. There’s an apparel factory, there’s a wallpaper, hand painted wallpaper factory. And these are old artisans
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Who teach people under the medieval futile apprentice system where you apprentice under somebody who’s an accomplished artist. They make purses for La Valley, for Prada, for Gucci. They make some of the best wines in Europe. Their bakery make some of the finest breads in Tuscany. They’re famous there, and it’s all free, and we need to be doing things. You go there, you live in nature, and you get reparented. I was talking the other day to this Olympic skier or snowboarder gold medal, three time Olympian gold medalist, heart bright, and we both came from big families. And we were talking about the fact that if we were left inside with my brothers and sisters, it was like a donnybrook. There’d be fist fights. We had real fist fights when we were my family as on each other.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: As soon as they sent us outside, we’d all be best friends again. And there’s something about nature that that gets you centered and it gets you back in connection with larger concepts, with your spirituality and something peaceful. And we need, and that’s what I hope to do with these arms, put people in nature, give them something. You get esteem, self-esteem by doing esteemable things, but just as importantly, to have them raise their own food, organic food. And Christopher Oliver Anthony who did that famous song about Richmond from Richmond is partnering with me on this. Oh, yeah. And I’m very, very excited about it because we need to start healing this country in so many ways. Not only the political divisions. Our children are in crisis. We lost 110,000 kids last year to drug overdoses. That’s twice that we lost in the 20 year Vietnam War. So there’s a war now on our children, and we made a big investment in these kids.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: We need to get them back. And my program is designed to, instead of making foreign wars, we’re going to bring the kids home. I’m for freedom, mark. So I’m going to lift the federal regulations against sales of marijuana. The states are doing it all anyway. The federal government ought to be able to tax it. And I’m going to use the taxes from sales of marijuana, which is a drug to fund a program to actually heal kids from drug addiction, from alcoholism, from suicide and mental illness. And eating good food is a critical part of that and getting people in the habit of eating good food. And I love what you’re seeing now in Bolivia where you’re seeing those, the color, the color coded food label, so people know I’m eating green, I’m reading, eating red, eating blue, and to give people of all classes, of all languages a comprehensible way of saying, I’m going to only feed my kid the good foods. I’m not going to feed them the bad foods. And it uses the economy to incentivize companies to make food that actually makes you healthier, because there’ll be a, we’re not going to regulate it. They don’t need more regulations in this country, but we’re going to inform the public and then we’re going to use the bully pulpit of the presidency, the moral persuasion of that to tell people, if you’re a mom, your duty, your kid is to feed ’em good food. Don’t feed them the yellow foods. Don’t feed them the red foods.
Dr. Mark Hyman: What do you think, Bobby? Of the marketing of junk food and stuff on TV and also pharma, those are the biggest advertisers on pharma. And I think we’re in New Zealand are the only ones who allow pharmaceutical advertising, I think, which is driving so much of our healthcare issues and also food advertising.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: I’m going to end pharmaceutical advertising on TV with the food advertising what I’d like to do. But this will take
Dr. Mark Hyman: Legislation, have warnings like they do at the end of drug ads, right? This could kill you.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: You eat the fruit loops, you’re poisoning your child. So yeah, warnings, people should have informed choice and they don’t have a choice. They have propaganda. And that’s it essentially is a lie.
Dr. Mark Hyman: It is. And I also think that that’s important for people to understand that so much of behavior is driven through marketing and advertising, whether it’s on TV or online, and it’s much more sophisticated and much more targeted now. And kids are predominantly targeted. I think there are over 5 billion embedded ads and games on Facebook for kids that were actually promoting junk food and processed food today. Our kids’ schools are the biggest fast food system in the country. If you combine McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Subway, our food system schools provides more junk food, all those combined. And it’s really, again, driving so much of our mental health crisis. We didn’t see this when we were kids, Bobby. I didn’t see kids with depression and anxiety and the mass amount of a DD and trouble with school. And the school lunches have really shifted into be basically outlets for fast food companies. How would you begin to think about that? I think that’s contributing both to the poor health as well as the mental health crisis we’re seeing.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: I mean, that’s actually something that the Department of Education has an 80 billion budget, and that’s one of the things that it ought to be doing is to make sure that school lunches are healthy and that the food that we’re giving to kids is directly related to their behavior, to their moods, to their performance in school, and to be able to tell people that you’re much more likely to have kids who are in a learning atmosphere if they’re not pumping up on sugar between and all of these other poisons between classes that are making them behaviorally that are ruining their moods, their behavior, and their learning capacity.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, it was Bobby. There was a school in Washington I heard about that was really interesting. It was a charter school started by a very wealthy guy, and it was really for kids who were underserved, who came from poor socioeconomic environments, who were often going to be more likely to up in jail than go to college. And what they did with these kids was they not only just had a great academic curriculum, but they fed them three meals a day. The kids ate three meals of whole healthy food a day, and these kids did so well. They were going to Harvard, Yale, all Ivy League colleges. They were succeeding. And then all the parents of the wealthier neighborhoods wanted to send their kids to the school, all having such high performance standards on testing. And I think in terms of research, we should be doing that research on what happens when you take school and this one school gets this typical standard school lunches, which is full of junk food and sugar versus a Whole Foods lunch and breakfast and dinner for kids and seeing what the different academic performances is.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Behavioral issues are aggression in schools, what their other issues are on a DD, and allergies and autoimmunity. All these things we’re seeing, it would be such a simple thing to do, but we’ve never done it. We’ve never asked those questions. So I get very excited when I think about you starting to do these things with NIH in the NIH budget and their whole a hundred plus page budget food was only mentioned once, and that was in the context of the Food and Drug Administration, which just makes me kind of crazy. The biggest thing that actually we can do to make the difference in our country’s health.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Yeah, I love that idea. I love the idea of being able to, I mean, to me, mark, as you know, kids are the biggest kids, ought to be the focus of everything in this country. We shouldn’t be talking so much about going to war in Ukraine. 113 billion we’re spending, and we’ve already committed to the Ukraine War and where President Biden wants to bring that up to 200 billion. The entire budget for EPA is 12 billion. The entire budget for the CDC is 12 billion. Imagine if we had that money instead of spending it on weapons and wars and making war in another country. What if we brought it home and made a war on bad health, made that the target and made our children healthy again? How much better off America would really be if we were giving kids three meals a day in school and they were good food and that we had good education? We have education. Let’s apply the market to our education policies as well and allow charter schools like that. If parents want to send their kids to another school, they ought to have a right to have a better school.
Dr. Mark Hyman: There are places where they’re connecting the schools with farms and local rural communities that are grow healthy food. And it’s actually activating rural communities, which are on the decline. They’re struggling. Their farmers are going out of business to becoming bankrupt, their suicides. So creating an agricultural system that’s designed to actually produce better food will also help create all this downstream benefit of improvements in our children’s health, on our health and better quality food. And also restore rural communities economically and socially, and also have downstream consequences for the environment which you’ve been working on your whole life, like better soil and less use of water, and less use of chemicals and better effects on helping carbon capture with the soil, all from actually doing the right thing. Right now, we’re doing all the wrong things and creating all these downstream consequences, and that can be flipped on his head.
Dr. Mark Hyman: And we can actually, I think even activate people to be engaged in farming like Roosevelt did with the New Deal. He had this Conservation Corps and all these people who are underemployed or unemployed and activated them to actually be part of the community. I think Ron Finley did this in LA with the food force where he got where people were homeless or just got out of prison or were prostitutes and started bringing them in and teaching how to Garden Farm in South central la and they’re actually creating amazing amounts of food for their community and doing a lot of things that could be done in actually activating our society to be more engaged and connected to each other.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Well, I agree with that. I’m going to enlarge AmeriCorps to do exactly that, to give kids another option and to go work on farms and grow organic food and care for the elderly and to get outside and do environmental repair and all of the things that actually make people happy.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah. It’s so great, Bobby. So as far as you’ve been sort of on the campaign trail, you’ve been talking about these issues, you also are a symbol of health. When I met you, you were reactive. It was like in your early fifties. Now you’re about to be 70 and you’re always active, but your diet was a bit worse. We fix that up, but now you’re out there pounding the pavement. You’ve got tons of energy. We’re seeing all these Instagram videos of you doing 24 pull-ups, all these pushups and incredible bench presses and leg presses. How do you think about fitness in America and how do you do it for yourself so that you stay committed and engaged? And how has it impacted you?
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: I mean, I have a couple of thoughts on that. I think people need to do what makes them happy, but we all need to stay in good shape. And that’s important for not just ourselves, our individual lives, our satisfaction, our relationships with our family, but it’s also important for our country to reduce the healthcare costs and to make sure that we’re there, that we’re in good shape to serve the public and to serve our community. It’s kind of a social obligation to try to keep yourself in shape, but whether you do that, I do. I do hike. I hike every day. I want to be outside, and that gets me centered. Then I spend a half an hour in the gym every day, and that for me works. But for other people, it may be yoga, it maybe you swimming, it may be running, whatever it is, but you have to be disciplined about it. And discipline is important. It’s how we’re not here to be building a big pile for ourselves. And whoever dies with the most stuff wins. We’re here to build something that’s much more enduring than wealth, and that’s character. And the way that we build character is by making commitments and then keeping them.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: So for me, I don’t like going to the gym. I don’t enjoy it. It’s not something that I look forward to, but I do it every day whether I want to or not, because I made a commitment to myself, and I’m just going to keep that commitment for me, it works to go to limit it to 30, 35 minutes. I can never make the excuse if I had to go for a full hour day. There’s times where I could say, I just can’t do that. You can always find 30 minutes to do something. So I try to, I keep it short, deliberately. I go in, I work really hard for 30 minutes and then I get out and I’ve been able to do that now for two weeks. I’ll be seven years old. So I’ve been able to do it for most of my adult life. I’ve done something like that. But I think for me, look, I have seven kids. I just came back from 10 days of skiing with them and I’m able to generally keep up with them and they’re all very, very good skiers. I’m going to
Dr. Mark Hyman: Go, yeah, I’ve been skiing you guys.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: I’m doing a political trip this week to Hawaii and I’m going to be, my son Finn is going to come with me and we’re going to surf together. So I can do that. I can go hiking every day. I can do, I can play volleyball with them. Some of my kids like to play tennis and I can do that. I can stay on a tennis court with ’em and I can be active and keep up with them and I can go camping. And so I want that in my life. I don’t want to be sitting on a couch for the rest of my life with a remote control in my hand, fighting with my family about what to watch because I want to watch the history show and the nature show and then you want to watch something else. It’s not a good thing for me to be sitting there about, but being outside is and being active for me, it just makes me happy and I want to watch my kids grow up. And that means, and
Dr. Mark Hyman: Also it’s great for helping you with obesity and mental health too, right? So it’s really has so many benefits personally and for your health and for your fitness. And
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: I’ll tell you what, mark, I don’t like eating healthy food. I’m going to tell you I’ve eaten your food. You’re a great cook, but you need, if you don’t have a live-in Cook, a lot of this stuff, I don’t know what it is. I was thinking this before when I was talking to you. Why does this stuff that tastes the best, why is it so bad? Why are Twinkies so bad for you? How did Evolution equip us to crave Twinkies and McDonald’s, French fries and Big Max when they’re so bad for you? I guess
Dr. Mark Hyman: Why? I can tell you why the food industry is designing these foods to be addictive. They talk about the mouthfeel and the bliss point of food and they know actually have tested this looking function rise. So they know how to activate your dopamine centers just like heroin or cocaine or nicotine or alcohol. And they actually now by strict criteria, according to a recent study, 14% of adults and 12% of kids meet the strict criteria for food addiction and leading to all the same symptoms if you had food, alcohol, addiction, and then alcohol addiction is about 14%. So it’s a big issue. And we’re designed evolution from an evolutionary point of view to find and eat as much sweeter sugar things as we can because it makes us store fat and gain weight for the winter. And animals do that, bears do that. I went to Adam, the island in Alaska, and at the beginning of the season, the bears were all eating salmon and protein and fat and they’re not getting that much weight.
Dr. Mark Hyman: And then at the end of the season, they’re eating berries and they gain 500 pounds. They become diabetic and hypertensive, but then they sleep it off. We just keep eating all winter long. And I think our and brains are designed to actually crave those things which are going to make us gain weight, which is a good thing. If there was a time of scarcity and starvation, which is most of how we evolved. But now we have an overabundance of food, we have an overabundance of ultra processed food. And in one study, I dunno if you know about the study from the NIH, they gave people ultra processed foods to eat as much as you want. And they gave people whole food to eat as much you want same people. They did a crossover trial, but when they had the ultra processed food, they ate 500 calories more a day because the body doesn’t register it as being satisfied eating that food.
Dr. Mark Hyman: No one’s going to eat a bag of avocados, but anybody can eat a bag of chips or a bag of Oreo cookies because if the way it affects the brain. So I think this is part of the issue is we have to start to recognize the science behind why these foods are so addictive, why we crave them so much, and to actually start to regulate these things so that we actually educate people about this process, about what’s going on with their brains and why they can’t keep their bodies healthy and why they’re in this vicious spiral. And the ozempic crazy this year has driven me crazy like, well, if we just give everybody ozempic who’s overweight in this country and obese, I mean obese, it’s going to cost almost half of our entire healthcare budget. If we give everybody who’s overweight, it’s going to be far more than the 4.3 trillion that we spend now.
Dr. Mark Hyman: So we have to think about how do we change this? And I love your talking about this, Bobby, because unless we take this as a national emergency, in my view, unless we take this head on, we’re really going to be unable to have a successful future as America, everything else we want to do our success as a country economically, our success as a country to develop science and intellectual endeavors and to make progress is all going to be hampered if our bodies and brains are deteriorating because of what we’re eating and the lack of our overall wellbeing and health.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Yeah, I talked to you about that one time because I was talking about I could take a mason jar, gallon mason jar full of honey and I could eat it and then I could do that every day for the rest of my life. And I said,
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Why did evolution hardwire me to want endless amounts of honey if it’s not good for you? And you said, well, in the wild when we evolved, it was really only available on these rare occasions. When we stumbled on a beehive and brave the bees, there was a huge cost to getting the honey because you had to get stung 500 times. But we did it because it tastes good, it’s worth it. And it’s usually they have that big hive at the end in the autumn, that’s when they’re maxed out on honey production. And that’s when you want to start storing fat for the winter. So that craving was actually serve the biological for the winter
Dr. Mark Hyman: Biological,
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Yeah, it was a good thing. But if honey is available every single day of your life, it’s not going to be good for you. And the same with sugar. The fruits only were bloomed. The only access to sugar was fruit and the fruit only bloomed at the end of the summer when you were storing weight again and you couldn’t get it all year. So it’s okay to crave it all the time because you couldn’t get it. Now that it’s available all the time,
Dr. Mark Hyman: It is a problem. I just came back from Africa, Bobby, I visited the ZA tribe, the hunter gatherers, and 20% of their diet is actually honey, but they’re thin and their fit minimum diabetes. Why? Because they’re eating 150 grams of fiber a day from all the tubers and the roots and all the wild plants they’re eating. We in America eat about eight grams of fiber per day per person, which is nothing. And that fiber is so important for a microbiome. It’s so important for reducing absorption of sugar. And so you can actually eat more sugar, carbohydrates if you have a very high fiber diet. It acts like a sponge. And that’s part of the problem with ultra processed food. There’s no fiber in there. There’s very few nutrients. It’s mostly, I don’t even know what you want to call, I call it Franken foods. And they actually, they’re depleted nutrients and most Americans are nutritionally deficient in omega threes and folate and zinc and magnesium and vitamin D and things that we should be getting from our food, but we don’t.
Dr. Mark Hyman: And so all this creates this dysregulated eating and dysregulated brain chemistry and dysregulated mood, and it’s really not that hard to fix. I’ve seen it over and over in my clinic at Cleveland Clinic in my own practice. I’ve seen it with so many people in my patients, and it doesn’t take that long. And I think people can do a reset and see their bodies change very quickly. And I think we should call in America to do a sugar reset or a 10 day diet reset to actually get people to try it and see what it feels like to just chip their body into a metabolic and brain chemistry state that isn’t hooked into this system. I just came back from 10 days in Amazon with no phone, no computer, no technology, and no wifi, no cell phone EMFs anywhere. And I slept so much better and my brain wasn’t always looking at my phone and in this state that it often is. And I think those kinds of things really are our fixable if we take a stand. And I think I’m wondering, what else do you think for America we could do to make ourselves
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Healthy? Love? I love what you’re saying about the 10 day sugar detox, and I’m going to challenge Americans to do that. That sounds like such a good idea. My uncle, when he was president, he came across a letter from a series of correspondence between the command of the Marine Corps and Franklin Roosevelt, which Franklin Teddy Roosevelt, this like 1903. And Teddy Roosevelt was saying, what is the basic physical requirements for Marine? And the commander of the Marine Corps said they have to be able to walk 50 miles a single day, and I think it was with a 30 pound pack or 40 pound pack. And so my uncle then sent that correspondence to the current commander, the Marine Corps, and he said, can Marines today do that physical accomplishment? And the Marines didn’t have that kind of stricture anymore. And my uncle then challenged the country to do a 50 mile walk. And he came into this cabinet meeting and he said, the cabinet, he said, at least one of you guys has to do the 50 mile walk. And it was clearly intended for my father, who is the youngest ever country my father ended up doing. It was really hard. I ended up doing it when I got out of college. I walked from Boston to Cape Cod.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Amazing.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: It took me 17 and a half hours and I was really, I’m tired, almost crying at the end of that. But I remember I was at Ken David when my father came in from his 50 mile walk. He walked on the CNO canal towpath where the mules used to code it, tow the barges from Washington DC to camp David. And when he came in, he had blisters on his feet and he was the most tired I’ve ever seen him. And I remember my mother massaging his feet. But I liked that kind of challenge. My uncle also did the presidential council on physical fitness. And we, at high school and grade school, we would get prizes for doing a certain amount of pull-ups, certain, I won the President’s prize in physical fitness when I was in fourth or fifth grade. No, maybe it was fifth and sixth grade. And it was a challenge. And he focused on that and got Americans to focus on it. He believed that America, we were the home of the free, the land of the brave. We were supposed to be the toughest people on earth. American wilderness had made us beef jerky tough and now we were all getting soft. And he was really, really distressed at that, this softness that was coming out of Mary. And then if he looked at what we looked like today, it would be he’d considered a national catastrophe.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Bobby, you’re right about this. And I think you’re talking about the Marines and the fitness level. I’m not sure aware of this, but there’s a group of over 700 retired admirals and generals who are talking about our problem of mission readiness in the fact that 70% of military recruits get rejected because they’re overweight or unfit to fight. And then when we had school lunches start, it was because during World War ii, so many kids were malnourished and they couldn’t join the army or the Navy or the military. And so we started school lunches and now those same school lunches are actually making the kids so unhealthy that they can’t actually get in the military. Even if they wanted to, and I don’t if you know this, but we saw 72% more evacuations from Iraq and Afghanistan because of obesity related injuries and problems in military than from more injuries.
Dr. Mark Hyman: That’s just staggering to me. And that was from this report from the retired animals in general. So I think we want to reduce our military, obviously we want to end forever wars. We want to not be constantly building up the military industrial complex, but just that fact alone of what we’re doing to our kids just is staggering. And I think that this physical fitness, health, nutritional fitness is so important and it’s got to be something that is essential part of our strategy as a nation going forward to actually do whatever else you want to do. We can’t be a successful nation if we’re all going downhill.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Yeah. Well, I’m going to get the country back in shape again. That’s what I’m
Dr. Mark Hyman: Going to fitness challenge in a diet challenge. The sugar challenge. I like that.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Yeah. We’ll do a diet challenge, all of these toxic exposures that are destroying the health of our kids. I’m going to do everything I can to eliminate ’em, and I’m going to do it. I might not be able to get every single one of ’em, but I’m going to start down that path and I’m going to eliminate a lot of ’em. We’re going to have a healthier population very soon after I take the Oval Office.
Dr. Mark Hyman: That’s great. I know we talked about this, but I’m going to put a link in the show notes to how people can get a chance to take a hike with you and I up in the hills of Los Angeles near our house, which was so fun. And we do that a lot when I come to la. So I think we’re going to try to get people involved and connected and understanding why it’s important to support these kinds of ideas and the political discourse that we’re not seeing anywhere else. So Bobby, thanks for your dedication to making America healthy, for making America really an incredible nation again, and stop this slide into what feels like our decline of the American dream. So thank you for just being so dedicated. I encourage everybody to check out Bobby’s website, Kennedy 20 four.com. See his campaign platforms. It’s not just health. It’s many, many other things. And don’t listen to what you hear in the news. Do your own homework. Listen to what he says, read what he’s talking about. And I think very few people out there are willing to take on what he’s taking on in terms of the thinking that needs to be done to change our government in a way that actually brings us forward to a healthier and happier future. So any last thoughts or words, Bobby?
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: No. But thank you very much, mark. And thanks for being a champion.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Well, I could be your birthday in a couple of weeks. I’m going to be in trekking in Patagonia near where we were rafting. I wish I
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Was treking with you in Patagonia.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, time more fun than a big birthday party inside, right? And definitely we’ll keep people up to date. We might have you back on the podcast and talk about things as we go forward. But it’s been great having you, and thanks for keeping up the work you’re doing to educate America, but what we need you to go forward to be a healthier, happy nation.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Thank you very much, mark. Thanks for everything you do to educate the public and to get us out here.
Speaker 3: Thanks for listening today. If you love this podcast, please share it with your friends and family. Leave a comment on your own best practices on how you upgrade your health and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And follow me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman, and we’ll see you next time on The Doctor’s Pharmacy.
Speaker 3: This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health, where I’m an Chief medical Officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guest opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only. It’s not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you’re looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. Now, if you’re looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It’s important that you have someone in your corner who is trained, who’s a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.
