With the new Trump Administration and RFK at the head of HHS, there are several things that I am hoping they spend time and money investigating.
3 Things I’m Interested in This Administration Doing
I actually have a list as long as my arm but these are the big 3.
What is Causing the Obesity Epidemic?
Even as long as I’ve been following the debate on this subject, no one can really say for sure exactly what it is. The very very first book I ever read on the subject was Lustig’s Fat Chance that put the blame on Fructose.
In fact, the very first step I ever took on my weight loss journey was to cut out only fructose from my diet. the idea was that fructose is processed identically to dietary fat in the liver so even though it didn’t raise blood sugar levels, it was stored very quickly as body fat near the liver causing obesity.
The next theory is that it is anything that raises blood sugar, so carbs like sugar, grains and other starches. The idea is that the body fights so hard to keep blood sugar levels in a certain range that eating anything that raises blood sugar levels will cause a dump of insulin so the body can very quickly either burn the sugar for fuel or store it as fat to get it out of the bloodstream.
Another theory is that it is the massive increase in hyper-palatable foods that trick our brains into wanting to eat far more calories than we otherwise would. These are foods that would never be found in nature and have been engineered by food scientists to be impossible to resist.
And finally, another idea is that there are just so many additives in our food supply that we never evolved to eat that the cumulative effect is to cause obesity over time. That the junk in our junk food is causing junk in the trunk.
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Which is it? I honestly have no idea. I think the answer is somewhere in the middle of all that. The one thing I’m sure of is that when you cut everything out except for meat and veggies, you generally start seeing weight loss.
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What is Causing the Rise in Autism?
RFK promised us an answer to this by September which seems absolutely crazy to me. Maybe I’m not used to my government promising me something on a strict timeline. Usually I get a raft of campaign promises with no timeline and a whole lot of gaslighting after the fact.
So what is causing the rise in autism? Some say vaccines, some say the corrupted food supply, some say pollution in the environment.
How RFK is going to be able to disentangle all that in a few short months seems crazy to me but the man is on a mission.
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The only thing that seems clear to me is that there absolutely is a rise in autism, not just a rise in the number of cases we are counting. If it was a difference in counting, we would see the same number of autistic 60 year olds as 12 year olds and let me tell you, that is not at all what we are seeing.
It is crystal clear to me that something has changed in our environment that would cause this increase.
Why Are So Many People Being Diagnosed With Mental Illnesses?
This is a big one for me because I don’t understand it all. The number of children with a prescription for a psychiatric medication is staggering. Why does every kid seem to have anxiety or depression? Why are our kids so sick?
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The one fact I keep coming back to is the more politically liberal the parents, the more likely the kids get diagnosed with a mental illness. Is there something in left-leaning ideology that makes people unwell or are liberal parents more likely to take their kids to psychiatrists?
I have no idea but it look like the life style that produces the most resilient children are the ones raised in politically conservative, religious, two parent households. Why is that?
I don’t know if any of these questions can be answered satisfactorily by RFK and his team but I sure hope that some headway can be made on the issue. These issues are too important to be left unanswered.
