For the past year or so, public health observers have been scratching their heads trying to divine a principle that might explain the seemingly scattershot set of initiatives unleashed by the Department of Health and Human Services and its Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. How could the Secretary be simultaneously for improved nutrition while touting the advantages of raw milk and animal protein? How can the administration claim to address chronic childhood disease while disparaging vaccines at every available turn and endorsing flavored vapes?
In retrospect, a parsimonious explanation was hidden in plain sight. In the MAHA Assessment report and much of the administration activity that has followed, RFK Jr. has been shouting from the rooftops, “America, you’re not enough like me.” Live your life the way I do, and health benefits will follow.
At first glance, RFK seems like an unlikely lifestyle paragon. He is, after all, someone whose history of promiscuous sexual behavior is well documented as is his heavy use of alcohol and heroin, all of which raise one’s risk of chronic disease.
None of this has deterred him. Indeed, he has made a point of placing himself literally front and center in his campaigns. It started with a video that required his wife to be strategically located to obscure his private parts while he showered in the background, followed by the macho pull-up contest with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy in National Airport. Then there was the regrettable episode in which he swam with his grandchildren in DC’s Rock Creek Park, a practice counseled against by the National Park Service. More recently, he has posed shirtless on an exercise bike, presumably attesting to the effectiveness of his personal fitness regimen. Sure enough, the White House issued a proclamation reestablishing the Presidential Fitness Test Award, with RFK Jr. prominently featured at the signing.
More worryingly, Secretary Kennedy has gone beyond these performative gestures and has set about using his government podium to impose his ideas of what constitutes health upon the rest of us. Of course, all political appointees bring their personal beliefs to the job, but no Secretary in living memory has sought to transform those beliefs into policies with the same blithe self-assurance and likely ill effects.
In fact, most of these beliefs were apparent long before he came into office. He even laid out his agenda for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on X shortly before the election, accusing the agency of “aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals and anything else that advances human health and can't be patented by Pharma.” This post has started to look more and more like RFK Jr.’s To-Do List.
And no amount of contrary evidence provided by his new employees seems to have been able to shake his views. Vaccines are the most obvious case. He has fired vaccine advisory committee members and installed new ones, many with anti-vaccine views, evaded even that stacked committee to sharply curtail the childhood vaccine schedule (a court has placed this effort on hold), and terminated half a billion dollars of research into mRNA vaccines.
But it doesn’t stop there. The new Dietary Guidelines for Americans reach exactly the conclusions one would have predicted from prior RFK Jr. pronouncements and actions: more protein (a particular obsession of gym bros), specifically from animals (“I am on a carnivore diet”), and questioning of the science around saturated fat (that’s him with the Thanksgiving turkey deep-fried in beef tallow). The Guidelines removed specific limits on alcohol consumption, and undermined their own limit on sodium consumption, saying those who exercise may need more (this is only true for very heavy exercisers).
More recently, he’s turned to peptides, citing his own experience recovering from an injury by using them. FDA, an HHS agency, is now moving to promote certain peptides on two fronts: allowing them to be compounded (a process generally confined to individual patients with specific needs) and permitting their addition to dietary supplements.
Perhaps, then, it was no surprise that FDA withdrew a proposed rule that would have banned indoor tanning for minors, a restriction in most Western European countries. After all, RFK Jr. was recently photographed leaving a DC-area tanning salon. And perhaps his own Zyn use explains the agency’s sudden about face to legalize some flavored vapes (though a $5 million donation from Reynolds American to a MAGA super PAC surely didn’t hurt).
At times, RFK Jr.’s horizon expands beyond his own health habits—to include those of his friends and family. A family member “was suicidal, literally every day” while attempting to quit certain antidepressants, he claimed, referring also to his own difficulty withdrawing from heroin. As for psychedelics, a focus of a recent deregulatory push by the administration, he cited the experiences of his son and several of his own close friends using the drugs to cope with grief.
Some of these initiatives, like addressing the overprescribing of antidepressants, may actually have merit. But does America really want health policy driven by the personal experiences of any individual, much less one with no relevant qualifications and a history of erratic behavior? After all, the very agency headed by the Secretary is dedicated to replacing anecdote with scientifically derived evidence. But, as long as he is at the helm, expect more idiosyncratic policy prescriptions, the kind where national policy is driven not by science, but by what the Secretary had for breakfast.
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Lurie is president and executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest and a former Associate Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.
