{"id":522751,"date":"2026-03-08T15:11:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-08T15:11:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/522751\/"},"modified":"2026-03-08T15:11:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-08T15:11:08","slug":"rfk-jr-s-junk-science-diet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/522751\/","title":{"rendered":"RFK Jr.\u2019s Junk Science Diet"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. puts on an apron before helping to serve lunch for a photo op at an elementary school in Austin, Texas on February 27, 2026. (Jay Janner\/The Austin American-Statesman via Getty Images)<\/p>\n

THE STANDARD NON-MAGA TAKE take on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is that it\u2019s too bad he\u2019s such a brain-wormed lunatic about vaccines, because he\u2019s a surprisingly thoughtful visionary about food and farming. After Donald Trump chose him to be health secretary, an Atlantic essay headlined \u201cRFK Jr. Is in the Wrong Agency<\/a>\u201d captured this conventional wisdom, with a memorable subhed emphasizing the problem was the job, not the man: \u201cHe could be a great agriculture secretary.\u201d<\/p>\n

But it was always strange to assume that a brain worm would pick and choose which judgments to infect. While Kennedy\u2019s progressive-sounding ideas about unhealthy food and industrial agriculture are more popular than his retrograde theories about lifesaving vaccines, many of them are just as pseudoscientific, conspiratorial, and wrong. In fact, they\u2019re grounded in the same strain of sloppy and simplistic thinking popular with biohackers and yogis on the right and left, the naturalistic fallacy that anything \u201cunnatural\u201d\u2014including genetically modified crops, pasteurized milk, fake meat, and chemical pesticides as well as mRNA jabs\u2014must be bad for our health and our planet.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s woo-woo nonsense\u2014the kind that results in the nation\u2019s top health official urging Americans to binge on fries<\/a> (as long as they\u2019re made with beef tallow rather than seed oils) and Coke<\/a> (as long as it\u2019s made with cane sugar rather than high-fructose corn syrup). The inconvenient truth is that you shouldn\u2019t worry about seed oils<\/a> or GMOs<\/a>; that \u201cnatural\u201d cane sugar is just as unhealthy<\/a> as processed corn syrup; that plant-based meat<\/a> isn\u2019t health food but is already healthier than cow-based meat; and that while some agrichemicals are genuinely dangerous, the weed killer glyphosate, Public Enemy Number One for Kennedy\u2019s Make America Healthy Again movement, is unusually benign<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Like the proverbial broken clock that\u2019s right twice a day, Kennedy has a few non-bonkers food beliefs. Yes, ultraprocessed junk like Twinkies is bad for you. No, we don\u2019t need artificial food dyes in our cereal. Yes, \u201creal food\u201d like fruits, vegetables, and whole grains is as nutritious as it was when Michelle Obama was pushing it. But Twinkies aren\u2019t unhealthy because of their processing or even their long ingredient list full of GMO crops grown in monoculture fields; they\u2019re unhealthy because they\u2019re sugary, high-calorie, low-nutrient junk that everyone knows is junk. They\u2019d still be junk if their corn syrup and starch came from organic non-GMO corn grown in diverse rotations.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s telling that Kennedy is also an outspoken advocate for red meat, which is associated with increased risk of cancer and heart disease<\/a>. The steaks atop the Trump administration\u2019s new food pyramid<\/a> come from industrially bred cattle stuffed with GMO grain in unnaturally crowded feedlots and then \u201cprocessed\u201d in assembly-line slaughterhouses, but they\u2019re vibes-aligned with caveman-diet meatfluencers like Joe Rogan, as well as Republican livestock-industry donors. Red meat also happens to be an environmental disaster; in the United States, we use more than half<\/a> our agricultural land to produce beef, which provides only 3 percent of our calories.<\/p>\n

In other words, Kennedy\u2019s food fights have as little to do with science as his antivax fights. There\u2019s no better example than the recent Trump world brawl over glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup. Jonathan Cohn recently wrote about this chemical warfare<\/a> here in The Breakdown, explaining how MAHA moms who consider glyphosate a toxic menace are furious about Trump\u2019s new executive order in support of glyphosate production. They\u2019re particularly mad that Kennedy, who has condemned Roundup as a poison fueling a national disease epidemic, was forced to defend the order on ludicrous national security grounds, when Trump was obviously just pandering to the agricultural and chemical lobbies.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an important political story, and it was fun to watch Kennedy\u2014who, as an environmental lawyer, often sued Monsanto over glyphosate\u2014endure one of the ritual humiliations Trump loves to inflict on his underlings. But in his public statement<\/a>, Kennedy continued to insist that glyphosate was \u201ctoxic by design,\u201d and that American farms were just too dependent on it to ban it immediately; he assured his MAHA fans that the Trump administration is still gradually \u201caccelerating the transition to regenerative agriculture\u201d that can \u201cincrease biodiversity\u201d and \u201creduce reliance on synthetic chemicals.\u201d When Trump\u2019s nominee for surgeon general, Casey Means, historically another ferocious glyphosate basher\u2014\u201cFor the love of God never buy Roundup,\u201d she once tweeted<\/a>\u2014bent the knee in her Senate testimony, she also declared<\/a> it too entrenched to abandon right away: \u201cWe cannot overturn the entire agriculture system overnight.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s true enough. In 2021, Sri Lanka\u2019s president thrilled regenerative advocates by banning all agrichemicals, and it was an overnight disaster: Farm yields crashed, creating food shortages, food riots, and a government collapse. So it\u2019s nice Kennedy is publicly rejecting that model, even if it\u2019s only because his boss wants to pander to donors. But the MAHA notion that all agrichemicals are evil, even if sometimes a necessary evil, is as childish as the Trumpian notion that they\u2019re inherently good, at least as long as the campaign donations keep flowing.<\/p>\n

Glyphosate is relatively good. It\u2019s less toxic than caffeine, and way less toxic than the herbicides that would replace it if it were banned. Some studies have suggested rodents that ingest massive amounts of it might face higher disease risks, but only tiny traces of it are in our food. Florida\u2019s quack surgeon general, the antivax crusader Joseph Ladapo, is trying to stir up a new MAHA panic over glyphosate<\/a>, but it isn\u2019t what\u2019s making Americans sick. Another inconvenient truth: The way food is grown has very little to do with how healthy it is. The cows on organic dairies don\u2019t get antibiotics (organic farmers usually sell them to conventional dairies when they get sick) and the crops on organic farms don\u2019t get sprayed with chemical pesticides (organic pesticides are often even nastier) but none of that makes much of a difference to the nutrition that reaches the consumer.<\/p>\n

What effective weed killers and other agrichemicals can do is help farmers grow lots of food per acre, so they need fewer acres to grow the same amount of food. That\u2019s a big deal for the environment, because farms and pastures have already overrun 40 percent of the Earth\u2019s habitable land\u2014and they\u2019re on track to overrun another dozen California\u2019s worth of forest to feed a growing global population by 2050. The world doesn\u2019t have another dozen California\u2019s worth of forest to spare. And when regenerative and organic farms produce lower yields than conventional farms, as they usually do, they drive more deforestation as well as malnutrition. They\u2019re also driving habitat destruction, so they\u2019re destroying biodiversity.<\/p>\n

The RFK conviction that agriculture should return to its kinder and gentler and more natural roots appeals to our romantic notions of small pastoral red-barn farms where soil is treated with love and animals have names instead of numbers. But there\u2019s plenty of evidence that those farms tend to be worse for the environment, and no evidence that they produce healthier food. Most rational people reject the dopey nostalgia of the antivax movement, the Luddite delusion that things were better before science and innovation started messing with natural processes. We don\u2019t need to let nature take its course with our food, either. We can pasteurize our milk so that it\u2019s safe, fertilize our crops so that they\u2019re abundant, and ignore the charlatans who want to banish modern technology from what goes into our bodies.<\/p>\n

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Michael Grunwald is the author, most recently, of We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate<\/a> (Simon & Schuster, 2025).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. puts on an apron before helping to serve lunch for a photo…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":522752,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[49,48,84,395],"class_list":{"0":"post-522751","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nutrition","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-nutrition"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/522751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=522751"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/522751\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/522752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=522751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=522751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=522751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}