At a press briefing on Tuesday, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. detailed the petroleum-based food dyes he wants banned from U.S. food.
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00:00Thank you Governor Morrissey. Thank you Speaker Schultz. Thank you to Dr. Mark Hyman who's been my friend and partner on these issues for over 20 years.
00:20Thanks Vaniyari who's been an extraordinary leader. And then Marty McCary, I'm so grateful that you agreed to join the administration. And Jay Bhattacharya, will you guys come up here and stand behind me.
00:38We have an amazing team at HHS. When my uncle was president in the 1960s, we had the healthiest people in the world.
00:50And one of the basic assumptions of our country was that because we were robust people, because we were vigorous, because we were tough, we had what my uncle called this beef jerky toughness.
01:04That was responsible for our country being the land of the brave and the home of the free, the greatest industrial power in the world, the wealthiest country.
01:16We owned half the wealth on earth when my uncle was president. And part of that was because of the vigor of our society.
01:23And that's one of the reasons he started the Presidential Council on Physical Fitness, because he saw that Americans, he felt that Americans were getting soft.
01:33And it was going to steal from us and erode all of our leadership, our moral authority and our values. And our role as an exemplary nation.
01:42And since his death, we've had this extraordinary chronic disease epidemic. When my uncle was president, 3% of American kids had chronic disease. Today, it's around 60%.
01:55And these are a broad category, the ones that Marty mentioned, like ADHD, neurological disorders, ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, tics, Tourette's syndrome, narcolepsy, ASD, autism.
02:13All of these are injuries that I never heard of when I was a kid. They were not part of the nomenclature. They weren't part of the dialogue.
02:21There was zero spent in this country treating chronic disease when my uncle was president. Today, it's about $1.8 trillion annually.
02:31It's bankrupting our nation. 74% of American kids cannot qualify for military service.
02:39How are we going to maintain our global leadership with such a sick population? We have all these autoimmune diseases, these exotic diseases.
02:50And again, I never heard of juvenile diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, Crohn's disease, and a hundred others.
02:58That were just unknown when I was a kid. I never knew anybody with a peanut allergy. I never knew anybody with a food allergy.
03:06I knew five of my seven kids have allergies. I never knew of anybody who had eczema. I knew of a very small number of children who had asthma, but that has exploded as well today.
03:18And our fertility is dropping dramatically. Teenagers in this country today have the same testosterone levels as 68-year-old men.
03:29Our girls are reaching puberty six years early, from 10 to 14 years old. And this is existential for our country. And we have to address it.
03:43And one of the problems, you know, when I met with, and I want to commend the food companies for working with us to achieve this agreement or this settlement.
03:57And when I went in a few months or about a month ago to meet with the food companies, I was talking with my staff about these petroleum-based dyes.
04:08And I said, if they want to add petroleum, they want to eat petroleum, they ought to add it themselves at home.
04:15But they shouldn't be feeding it to the rest of us.
04:17And without our knowledge or consent. And unfortunately, one of the, and we are going to, we're going to get rid of the dyes.
04:31And then one by one, we're going to get rid of every ingredient and additive to the school in, in food that we can legally address.
04:40One of the problems is at the industry, which all of these industries cast a dark shadow historically over this agency.
04:50And there's so many conflicts that we are now systematically eliminating.
04:55That has allowed them to suppress the science.
04:58There's shockingly few studies, even on food dyes, and on all these other, all these other ingredients as well.
05:06And Jay Bhattachara, who is here and who is running the director of NIH, is now narrowly targeting these kind of food additives,
05:17or scientific study, so that one by one, we can start eliminating them where they can.
05:23Where we can't, there's things that we'll never be able to eliminate, like sugar.
05:27And sugar is poison. And Americans need to know that.
05:31It is poisoning us. It's giving us a diabetes crisis.
05:35When I was a kid, I always say this, a typical pediatrician would see one case of diabetes in his lifetime.
05:42Today, it's one out of every three kids who walks through his office door.
05:46In our most recent study from NIH, 38% of American teens, half our adult population, this is existential.
05:55We are spending as much on mitochondrial disorders like diabetes as we spend on our military budget.
06:03We can't continue to exist like this.
06:06And the, you know, the problem is industry is making money on keeping us sick.
06:13As Jay pointed out, ADHD is associated with all these behavioral disorders.
06:21But those disorders are treated not by changing our diet, providing medications to treat our kids.
06:30And they can medicate it and medicate it, and that is the only solution.
06:34And, you know, I would point out that there is part of the etiology of these diseases is a kind of media malpractice.
06:43A mass psychosis that has our media not talking about this.
06:48And one of the possible reasons for that is the amount of money that's coming from the pharmaceutical companies into our media and from these food companies.
07:01Or the advertising.
07:07The advertising has at least paid plays a factor to that revenue, that extraordinary revenue stream in disabling their capacity or their inclination for skepticism and for critical thinking.
07:26So Americans don't know what they're eating.
07:28And they don't know the implications of those things.
07:31And for those products, Mark Hyman says in his book, The 10-Day Sugar Detox Diet, which I'll give a plug to, is a very good book.
07:40He talks about how dangerous sugar is and how it's as addictive as crack.
07:45And our children are addicted to it from when they're little kids.
07:50Our agency recommends, I think, a huge amount of sugar for kids from when they're born.
07:57And it's hurting them.
08:00And it's addicting them.
08:01And it's changing their taste buds so that they crave it.
08:04And it's disabling our population.
08:07So for those ingredients that we can't ban legally, we're going to start informing Americans about what they're eating.
08:16And we're going to try to work with Congress and the White House to make sure that we have adequate labeling.
08:23So mothers who go into the grocery stores know what is good for their children and what is not.
08:29I want to say one other thing about the moms.
08:32When I went and spoke for the first time, when I met with the heads of all the food industry companies,
08:41one of the things that they said to us is that the worst thing for us is if we have a patchwork of legislation in all these different states,
08:50because then we're not capable of marketing nationally distributed products,
08:58because we're going to have different regulations in every state.
09:01And they didn't want that.
09:02And that's one of the reasons they came to the table with us.
09:06I want to thank Speaker Schultz.
09:08I want to thank Governor Morrissey.
09:10And I visited many other governors in Virginia and West Virginia and Arizona and Utah and other states that are now that are banned,
09:21that are having these local bans.
09:23But those bans have given us leverage to make demands in the food company.
09:28And the only reason that those companies, that those states have banned these products is because of these ladies and millions or more across the country,
09:38the warrior moms who have powered the Maha movement.
09:41And I just want to urge all of you, it's not the time to stop.
09:53It's the time to redouble your efforts, because we have them on the run now.
09:58And we are going to win this battle.
10:00And four years from now, we're going to have most of these products off the market,
10:05or you will know about them when you go to the grocery store.
10:08So I want to thank you.
10:11And finally, and most importantly, I want to thank President Trump.
10:21President Trump often, you know, says that he's going to make America great again.
10:26But he knows that he cannot make our country great again if our country is weak, if we're not healthy, if we don't have vigor, if we're not a robust people.
10:38He says that he's going to restore the American dream.
10:41And a healthy person has a thousand dreams.
10:45The sick person only has one.
10:47And right now, there's 60% of the people in this country who have only one dream.
10:53That they can make it through a day without pain, without, with energy, without having to take medications.
11:02And we are going to change that for our country.
11:05And I want to thank the moms and thank President Trump for his confidence in my leadership and for allowing me to surround myself with such an extraordinary team of scientists who are going to restore transparency to this agency.
11:20We're going to do replicated science.
11:23We're going to restore gold standard science so we know what's in our food and we can eliminate it.
11:28Thank you all very much.
11:29Thank you all very much.