A The new federal report published by the Make America Healthy Again (Maha) commission describes the health of children as in the alarming decline due to poor diet, chemical exhibitions, over-medication, a lack of physical activity and much more. Certain industrial groups, the American health care system and parental choices are largely blamed – while the socioeconomic factors that have shown that research has shown many of these problems are barely mentioned.
President Donald Trump asked for the report in an executive decree of February establishing the Maha commission, whose main mission is to treat the chronic illnesses of the child. The health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. chairs the commission.
The group report has four main engines of the chronic child’s disease, particularly putting the blame on food that children eat and their daily habits. It targets ultra-transformed foods, citing a study in 2021 which revealed that almost 70% of the calories of an American child come from this category and maintains that these foods cause weight gain.
The report also indicates that children are overexposed to chemicals, take too many drugs, spend too little time doing physical activity and are too concentrated on technology. Although the report is based on a certain responsibility on food and pharmaceutical industries – which says that it has an undue influence on food directives and drug studies – it also criticizes certain parental decisions.
The report indicates, for example, that an increase in chronic childhood illnesses is directly linked to children’s food, and that dependence on ultra -revised foods “has been a dramatic change since the 1960s, when most foods have been cooked at home using whole ingredients” – a nod to demographic changes in which more women are in the workforce rather than staying at home. ”
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He indicates that more than a third of parents leave electronic devices on in their children’s rooms at night, disturbing their sleep.
This adds that children are too medicalized, in part, due to “doctors and well -intentioned parents who try to help a child”.
It is also said that pregnant mothers eat too much ultra -local food; that pesticides, microplastics and pollutants are commonly found in the blood and urine of pregnant children and women; And that almost all breast milk samples tested in America “contains a certain level of persistent organic pollutants”.
The authors of the report claim that teenagers of single -parent families tend to have higher anxiety, depression and ADD levels than those of two -parent households, citing studies of 2017 and 2015. “Gentle Parenting”, a popular parental style empathing empathy and respect, also attracts their criticism; The authors cite a report noting that IT and traumatized care “potentially pathologize normal emotions, undermine resilience and contribute to the increase in anxiety and depression rates in children and adolescents.”
Some have praised the extended nature of the report and the fact that it draws attention to the many obstacles to which families face to raise healthy children. “Parents are set up to fail,” says Scott Faber, vice-president of government affairs for the environmental working group, a non-profit national organization that focuses on food, agriculture and the environment. “There are simply too many good choices and too many bad choices.”
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The report illustrates the Make America Healthy Again platform, which focuses on how food and chemicals make people less healthy. The movement has supporters of the candidate of the general surgeon, Dr. Casey, means and in a vocal contingent of mothers across the country. Like many policies in the Trump administration, it seems to return to decades ago when, according to the leaders of the movement, things were better in America – an affirmation which is in a large false part of health.
“In this report, there are these ideas that we need to return to a nostalgic and pre -existing state where children had no mobile phones, slept more and made a campsite,” explains Peter Lurie, president and executive director of the Center for Science In the Public Interest, a non -profit organization focusing on food security, nutrition and health. “It doesn’t really seem to live in the real world.”
This is not the first time that a presidential administration has planned to worsen the health of children in America and blame the lifestyle choices. The Biden administration has published a report on diet -related diseases, and the Obama administration had a working group on infantile obesity which submitted a report to the president. However, the MAHA Commission report differs in that it barely mentions the socio-economic factors that worsen obesity and infant diseases, such as a lack of access to healthy foods or green spaces.
People may know what is healthy, but may not be able to easily access nutrients due to a lack of grocery stores where they live; They may want their children to spend more time outside, but are worried about the crime or lack of green space. “An approach is to invest in these communities so that people have access to the resources they need,” said Nour Makarem, a co-leader of the Chronic Disease Unit of the Mailman School of Public Health of Columbia University.
The commission now has 80 days to find a strategy to improve the health of American children depending on the report. But some criticisms point out that efforts to find solutions to some of the problems described by the report have been reduced by the current administration.
The report comes in the middle of drastic reductions or eliminations of many government programs working to solve some of these problems. The layoffs have decimated the chronic disease prevention center in the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Trump administration has reduced a program that has brought food to local farm schools. Shortly before the publication of the Maha report, the House of Representatives of the United States adopted a bill which would seriously reduce the financing of the additional nutritional aid program, or SNAP, which helps families with low income to buy food.
Clinical trials and studies examining the prevention of chronic diseases and the means of helping people access healthy foods have been cut in the reduction of subsidies by the United States Administration Institutes of Health and Other Sources, adds Makarem.
“I do not know that we have identified the most innovative approaches to find out what is healthy and that people adopt healthy behavior,” she said. “None of this can be accomplished without research and clinical trials.”
