The US Secretary for Health and Social Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testifies before the Senate Committee for Health, Education, Labor and Pensions on Capitol Hill on May 14, 2025 in Washington, DC.
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The Trump administration published a radical report on Thursday, offering its analysis of what stimulates chronic diseases among the children of the country.
The report entitled “The Maha report: give our healthy children to catalogs in detail a” crisis in chronic diseases “, including high obesity rates, asthma, autoimmune conditions and behavioral health disorders.
The 72 -page document is a product of the Maha commission, which was created by President Trump through An executive decree February 13. The Commission, chaired by the Secretary of Health, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has enlisted various members of the cabinet, including the secretaries of agriculture and education and the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, and met in private in recent months.
“There is something that is wrong and we will not stop before defeating the chronic illness epidemic,” said Trump during a White House event on Thursday, flanked by secretary Kennedy and other members of the committee.
A large part of what is detailed reflects the views that Kennedy articulated during his many public appearances.
The report identifies four main engines of the increase in the chronic child’s disease: poor diet, environmental chemicals, chronic stress and lack of physical activity and over -mediation. In accordance with the messaging that animated the Maha platform, the report blame a large part of the conflicts of interest and the influence of companies in the food, chemical and pharmaceutical industries.
The report laid the basics of the Maha Commission to develop a strategy to combat infant disease, which should occur by mid-August according to the February decree.
The proposal that nutrition, lifestyle and exposure to pollution and other harmful chemicals conspire to harm children’s health is not controversial in longtime researchers in public health.
“Many of us have been calling for these problems for decades now,” said Dr James PerrinProfessor of pediatrics at the Harvard Medical School. “It is a real American problem, and it is not the one we see so dramatically in other countries.”
But the report does not solve some of the central tensions that characterized the Maha platform in Kennedy from the start.
“They make an excellent diagnosis and they have a very low treatment plan,” explains the DR Philip LandriganProfessor of pediatrics and public health at Boston College.
Among the concerns: the report does not contain an in-depth discussion of socio-economic factors as well as poverty, which is a key predictor of chronic disease.
“They recognize that ultra-transformed foods are cheaper, but do not recognize that growing poverty and wealth gap lead more people and children, to rely on cheaper foods,” said Carmen Marsit, Environmental health teacher at EMORY University.
The report also calls into question the safety of vaccines and suggests that possible links with infantile diseases have not been studied in depth.
“It’s just not true. There have been abundant studies,” said Landrigan.
More broadly, the emphasis on the progress of research and public health initiatives is contrary to many of the recent actions taken by the Trump administration.
For example, the report describes the risks of exposure to harmful chemicals on children’s health – an area that Dr. Sheela Sathyanarayana, pediatric professor at Washington University, said much more attention. And yet the Trump administration cuts the staff to key agencies And dissolve an office in the environmental protection agency that studies the toxic effects of chemicals.
It agrees with the primordial theme that our medical system and our research infrastructure are too focused on the treatment of these diseases and the search for remedies.
“We really have to go more in a prevention model,” says Sathyanarayana.
“But some of the actions they have taken in prevention,” she said.
As head of the Ministry of Health and Social Services, Kennedy led the dismissal of thousands of federal workersCup to the centers for dise control and prevention and elimination of billions of dollars of contracts And the subsidies of the National Institutes of Health, which all support the type of research and data underlying the report.
Dr William DietzA researcher for childhood obesity at George Washington University, said the emphasis on the MAHA commission on the damage to ultra-treble food is justified, although the ratio depicts the subject with a large brush, while in fact, certain processed foods are more problematic than others.
However, he worries the federal government cannot even be able to accurately follow his progress in obesity in the future.
“”I really worry that the scalpel that was taken to the CDC in general threatens the ability to monitor health. And it will be some of the same data sets that are necessary to assess progress in many of these areas, “he said.
The report reserves for the very end of the space to sketch a range of solutions offered: ask the National Institutes of Health to finance new tests on whole diets and on potentially harmful ingredients in food supply; Push the NIH and Food and Drug Administration to improve post-marketing monitoring of pediatric drugs; support new research on the safety of pediatric drugs; And launch a national initiative on lifestyle.
We do not know where funds or staff would come from these priorities.
Lauren WiskWho studies chronic diseases in UCLA children, says that the figures cited on infant disease rates are “reasonable”.
But it is concerned about Kennedy’s rhetoric which seems to promote the idea of ”magic bullets” such as the elimination of food dyes instead of focusing on large -scale programs that give access to healthy foods for low -income families or to fight atmospheric pollution, which is linked to asthma and other conditions.
“This administration has not been so delighted to talk about social policies that must be in place to combat the start of pediatric diseases,” she said.
“They looked at things that are more splashing, easier to point their finger, but when you really think of the epidemiology of this – it will not be the most effective strategy if they want to be serious about the idea of reducing the problem.”