Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Video Screengrab / YouTube
The senior advisor for the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) agenda minces no words when it comes to challenging the status quo operations of the Big Pharma and Big Food empires that, up until now, have thrived without exposure.
Calley Means’ tagline on his X platform account gets right to the heart of his role as a top Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) MAHA advisor: “Every institution in healthcare profits when kids are sick and loses money when they’re healthy. Trying to change that incentive.”
But Means suggests that, while Democrats and many in the media may find it politically advantageous to describe MAHA’s plan to eliminate synthetic chemicals from the nation’s food supply as a “ban,” the campaign is really about “common sense.”
“We don’t even see it as a ban,” Means said during an interview Thursday with Newsmax host Rob Finnerty of “Finnerty.” “There’s really just common-sense questions being asked, which is, why aren’t we conducting science on the 10,000 chemicals that are in our food – but not in any other country? You know, Europe doesn’t have a veto on our policies.”
One of the primary points HHS is intent on getting across to Americans is that major international food corporations have continued to insert synthetic chemicals into processed foods sold in this country even as many other nations have banned them for years.
As CatholicVote reported April 22, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary announced “we are simply asking American food companies to replace petroleum-based food dyes with natural ingredients for American children, just as they already do for children in other countries.”
“Our kids are 38% pre-diabetic, 50% obese, but those rates are 10% or less in Europe and Japan,” Means noted to Finnerty. “You gotta ask questions.”
“So, we started with this common-sense action of the crude oils, the petroleum dyes,” he elaborated. “They’re phased out of every other country. And we’re actually moving really quick. I mean, these are going to be out of the food supply by 2026.”
Means explained food industry officials had pushed for a 2030 deadline to remove the dyes, but HHS was insistent on “moving at rapid-fire pace.”
“This is just one of those no-brainer things that politicians of both parties talked about for 30 years,” he said, pointing to a study 30 years ago that found “red dye # 3” caused cancer. Subsequently, the dye was removed from cosmetics.
Means said the Trump administration is simply using the facts to ask common-sense questions about why Americans are sicker than other peoples of the world.
Observing the issue from another perspective, he posted on Friday a chart on the X platform revealing the US’s “reliance on foreign imports for fruits and vegetables has grown dramatically.”
“We can’t currently produce enough whole food to satisfy our nutritional needs,” he explained. “Today, 60% of our fruits and 40% of our vegetables come from foreign imports.”
“The fact that the US imports so much produce has a serious health impact,” Means added, providing another chart depicting the decline in nutrients derived from broccoli since 1975.
“The farther food travels, the more freshness declines – and the more nutrients are lost,” he noted. “Look at the nutrient loss in an average piece of US broccoli. A lot of this is due to it traveling longer.”
Means emphasized to Newsmax the common goal of both President Donald Trump and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to reveal the relationship between the state of food and childhood disease.
“We have the highest rates of pediatric cancer, pediatric obesity, pediatric diabetes, pediatric cardiology issues, and, yes, skyrocketing rates of autism,” he said. “If President Trump and Secretary Kennedy did anything in the last 100 days, they’re talking about the interconnectivity, the poisoning that’s happening to American children.”
When asked specifically about autism, Means replied the disorder “is related to our microbiome, to the toxins.”
“We don’t know exactly what, but we should study it,” he said. “And it’s so telling that, after $50 billion a year the NIH [National Institutes of Health] spent, where they literally created the pandemic – they funded the research that created a global pandemic – they haven’t created any innovation to actually reverse or prevent a disease for the American people.”
“Secretary Kennedy, President Trump, Jay Bhattacharya at the NIH say ‘We’re going to figure out what’s causing the autism epidemic. We’re going to do real science,’” Means said, adding “and they get attacked for that! You literally have the medical establishment attacking this administration conducting science on issues that truly matter to Americans.”