While dropping out of the presidential race and endorsing former President Donald Trump on Friday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Vice President Kamala Harris has “no interest” in ridding the nation’s food supply of toxic chemicals or cleaning house at agencies like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or Department of Agriculture (USDA).
During his announcement, Kennedy suggested that he would be involved in a future Trump administration with a focus on ending chronic health issues and raising regulatory standards for the United States food supply.
“These agencies — the FDA, USDA, CDC, all of them — are controlled by giant for-profit corporations. Seventy-five percent of the FDA’s funding doesn’t come from taxpayers; it comes from pharma. Pharma lobbyists cycle in and out of these agencies,” Kennedy said:
With President Trump’s backing, I’m going to change that. We’re going to staff these agencies with scientists and doctors who are free from industry funding. We’re going to make sure that the decisions of consumers, doctors, and patients are informed by unbias science. [Emphasis added]
We’re going to stop subsidizing the worst foods with our agricultural subsidies. We’re going to get toxic chemicals out of our food. We’re going to reform the entire food system. For that, we need new leadership in Washington because, unfortunately, both the Democrat and Republican Party are in cahoots with the big food producers, big pharma, and big ag[riculture], which are among the DNC’s major donors. [Emphasis added]
Kennedy also said Harris, who refused to take a phone call from him, “has expressed no interest in addressing this issue.”
“Four more years of Democratic rule will complete the consolidation of corporate and neocon power, and our children will be the ones who suffer most,” Kennedy said.
Trump, Kennedy said, “has adopted these issues as his own to the point that he has asked to enlist me in his administration.”
Among the issues Kennedy will spearhead while campaigning with Trump is massively reforming the U.S. food supply, which he blames for widespread chronic illnesses among Americans that financially are a boon to big pharmaceutical corporations.
“Today … we spend more on healthcare than any country on Earth, twice what they pay in Europe. And, yet, we have the worst health outcomes of any nation overall. We’re about seventy-ninth in health outcomes — behind Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Mongolia, and so many other countries. Nobody has a chronic disease burden like we have,” Kennedy said:
Two-thirds of American adults and children suffer from chronic health issues. Fifty years ago, that number was less than one percent. We’ve gone from one percent to 66 percent. In America, 74 percent of Americans are now overweight or obese — and 50 percent of our children. One hundred and twenty years ago, when somebody was obese, they were sent to the circus. They were literally case reports about them. Obesity was almost unknown … today, one out of every three kids is diabetic or pre-diabetic. [Emphasis added]
…
There’s been an explosion of neurological disorders — ADD, ADHD, speech delays, Tourette syndrome, narcolepsy, Asperger’s, autism. In the year 2000, the autism rate was one in 1,500. Now, autism rates in kids are one in 36 nationally. Nobody is talking about this … this is a crisis that 77 percent of our kids are too disabled to serve in the United States Military. [Emphasis added]
About 18 percent of American teens now have fatty liver disease … that disease, when I was a kid, only affected late-stage alcoholics who were elderly. Cancer rates are skyrocketing in the young and the old … one in four American women are on anti-depressant medication. Forty percent of teens have a mental health diagnosis, and 15 percent of high schoolers are on aderrol, and half a million children are on SSRIs. [Emphasis added]
Kennedy said “ultra-processed food” as well as “toxic chemicals in our food, our medicine, and our environment” are responsible:
“About 70 percent of American children’s diet is ulta-processed — that means manufactured in the factory. These foods consist primarily of processed sugar, ultra-processed grains, and seed oils. Laboratory scientists … deployed thousands of scientists to find new chemicals to make the food more addictive. These ingredients didn’t exist 100 years ago. Humans aren’t biologically adapted to eat them. Hundreds of these chemicals are banned in Europe but ubiquitous in American processed food.
The second culprit is toxic chemicals in our food, our medicine, and our environment. Pesticides, food additives, pharmaceutical drugs, and toxic waste permeate every cell of our bodies. This assault on our children’s cells and hormones is unrelenting. To name just one problem, many of these chemicals increase estrogen. Because young children are ingesting so many of these hormone disrupters, America’s puberty rate is now occurring at age ten to 13, which is six years earlier than girls were reaching puberty in 1900. Our country has the earliest puberty rates of any continent on the Earth. No, this isn’t because of better nutrition, this is not normal. Breast cancer is also estrogen-driven, and it now strikes one in eight women. We are mass poisoning all of our children and our adults. [Emphasis added]
As a result, Kennedy said, the federal government is spending twice as much on treating chronic illnesses as it is on funding the U.S. military. At the same time, Kennedy said the government’s agricultural subsidies for processed food are “destroying small farms, and they’re destroying our soils.”
“What is happening in our country? Why isn’t this in the headlines every day … why are we allowing this to happen to our children?” Kennedy said.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.