Make America And You Healthy Again!

I’ve been rooting and praying for all of President Trump’s cabinet picks, but one I especially was excited to see pass all the Senate scrutiny and interrogation and eventually be confirmed was Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also known as RFK Jr. Even when he was running for president as a Democrat, I enjoyed hearing him talk about his goal of researching the cause of chronic illnesses, especially in children, and his stumping for eating real food, avoiding processed food, and investigating the additives in our food. The Democrats tried to prevent him from being on the ballot, denied him Secret Service protection, and were so mean to one of their own, I knew he must have some good qualities if they were that against him.

RFK Jr. ended his presidential campaign and is now the head of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. While I don’t agree with some of his political views, I’m completely onboard with him joining President Trump’s team to Make America Healthy Again, otherwise known as MAHA.

My MAHA Story!

First, a little of my history and explanation of why I’m so excited to be a “MAHA Mom.” Actually, I was a MAHA Mom, MAHA Wife, and now MAHA Grammie, long before there was MAHA!

My first career out of college was as a hospital clinical Registered Dietitian. I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Food Administration, a one-year internship at the Santa Monica VA Hospital and UCLA, passed a grueling registration test, and maintained a continuing education requirement for many years.

I was naive when I entered the nutrition field back in the early 70’s. I was going to be the Florence Nightingale of Dietetics, so sure that R.D.s would have the respect of M.D.s after all the education it took to become a Registered Dietitian. Doctors would surely treat me as a peer in the medical treatment process. Patients would be eager to learn how they could overcome or even prevent many of their illnesses by simply eating healthy.

My lofty aspirations of people wanting to help themselves by eating healthy turned out to be the most disappointing, degrading, deflating and unfulfilling career I’ve ever experienced. It’s even easier being an evangelist now helping people turn to Jesus to save their spiritual souls than it was back then trying to help people save their physical bodies.

Both doctors and patients it seemed would prefer depending on pills, shots, surgeries, and repeated hospitalizations rather than including a healthy diet in their treatment plan. Patients accused me of taking away their favorite foods thus their reason for living! Often, I got to know patients well because it was like a revolving door of them returning back to the hospital worse than when I last saw them.

I would counsel wives that they were loving their husband to death by feeding him unhealthy food and not following the prescribed diet. I was shocked when most of the wives just looked at me with eyes that conveyed, I’m going to feed him whatever he likes because it’s his love language. I pleaded, “Even if it kills him?”

Doctors didn’t respect R.D.s and patients resented us. After several years of this career abuse, I realized I couldn’t do this for the rest of my life. After dipping my toe into sales, I discovered I was good at it, so I became a manufacturer’s rep for dietetic products and my customers were those poor berated R.D.’s in hospitals.

But once a dietitian always a dietitian as my family will attest to in how I feed them! Times have changed and nutrition has become more popular, yet still Americans are the most overweight and unhealthy people in the world?! When RFK Jr. abandoned his presidential aspirations and teamed up with Trump and I heard their joint goal was to Make America Healthy Again, I bought the MAHA trucker’s hat and started cheering for RFK Jr. to be successful.  I wasn’t alone.

I wore my Make America Healthy Again hat everywhere during the election campaign, especially when we went shopping. Now, I wear it victoriously. People often stop me to say, “I love your hat!” Or even, “I’m praying for them.” Sometimes it’s just a knowing smile or nod. When I wore it on vacation, I even had a radiologist tell me how happy he was that soon government officials would be taking steps to eliminate additives and unhealthy ingredients in our food, especially processed foods. I was thrilled to hear a doctor onboard with MAHA!

I’ve always been a huge proponent of reading all food labels. If there’s more than five ingredients, dyes, sugar, or ingredients you don’t recognize, don’t buy it or eat it. Especially, don’t give it to your growing children. Fresh is always best.

I now write a Nutrition Nook column in the bi-monthly Idaho Christian Living Magazine. It’s fun to still share my nutritional knowledge and passion. Maybe in the future, I’ll post some of those columns in this Monday Morning Blog.

Who is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And What is His Spiritual Testimony?

I watched the swearing in of RFK Jr. as the next HHS Secretary by Justice Neil Gorsuch in the Oval Office and President Trump signed an executive order establishing the Make America Healthy Again Commission, which will be led by Kennedy. I was super impressed to hear Kennedy give God the glory in his remarks, “For twenty years I’ve been on my knees every morning praying that I could end the childhood disease epidemic and God gave me President Trump.”

The night of his swearing in, Kennedy was interviewed on the Laura Ingraham program. You can watch the interview @ RFK: We’re In A Spiritual Crisis; “People Feel Disconnected, And That’s Fueling Depression, Addiction & Chronic Disease” | Video | RealClearPolitics. Here’s a snippet of the opening.

INGRAHAM: Before we get into the priorities on day one, you talked about prayer today in the Oval Office with all of those paintings from Reagan to Andrew Jackson to Abraham Lincoln, Washington all around you. Why did you go to that moment?

KENNEDY JR.: Well, you know, I think it’s relevant because we’re not just in a health crisis, but we’re in a spiritual crisis and those things are connected. And you know, so many times during my campaign, traveling across the country, I sense that that people are feeling disconnected.

You have a whole generation of kids that feel alienated, dispossessed. They are in an existential crisis, not only because their health is, you know, 77 percent of our kids can’t qualify for military service. There is no purpose in their lives and no sense of usefulness or effectiveness or connectedness to their communities. And that drives also the chronic disease epidemic, and the epidemics we’re seeing of depression, of suicide, of alcoholism, of drug addiction. I think we have to address all of those things at the same time. We can’t just say we’re going to make you physically healthy.

INGRAHAM: That’s a tall order.

KENNEDY JR.: Yes, well, I think, you know, we all have to learn. You know, we need to get up in the morning and not think about, what am I going to do to make myself happy today? We have to get up and say, what am I going to do to make myself useful today, to be useful to my friends, to my family, to my community and that paradoxically is ultimately the path to happiness connected to this, you get from doing, you know, from doing good things, from being of service to others.

In the interview, Kennedy told Laura that he’s been a recovering addict for 42 years and goes to meetings every day. His references to God both during his swearing in and this interview made me want to delve a little deeper. Here’s what I found in an article in the Western Journal “RFK Jr. Talks About His 14-Year Battle with Addiction and How He Overcame It Through Faith in God.” The author Richard Bledsoe wrote the following words July 11, 2023, while RFK was still running for president himself.

“Politicians often evoke God for cynical reasons. They may be trying to appear pious, claim divine approval for some policy proposal, or fit in with the priorities of their constituents. However, when it’s a personal story of how God impacted a life, and the visible evidence supports that claim, it’s possible even a politician can bear witness to God’s love.”

The addiction RFK Jr. struggled with began when he was 15, a year after his father was assassinated in 1968, although on the Ingraham Angle he made the statement he always felt he was born with a propensity to an addiction.

In a podcast interview with MIT research scientist Lex Fridman, Kennedy spoke about his addiction and recovery. “When you’re an addict, you’re living against conscience,” he said. “I was always trying to get off of drugs, never able to. But I never felt good about what I was doing.”

The addiction grew despite Kennedy’s religious upbringing. He had to find his way back to God before he could beat it. After learning that addicts who believe in God have better recovery rates, Kennedy chose to behave as if he were a believer, even though at first it was a pretense. “I just started pretending there was a God watching me all the time,” he said.

Kennedy said then God accomplished the impossible for him.

“I had a spiritual awakening and my desire for drugs and alcohol was lifted miraculously,” he said. “And to me, it was as much a miracle as if I’d been able to walk on water because I had tried everything earnestly, sincerely, and honestly for a decade to try to stop and I could not do it under my own power.

“And then all of a sudden, it was lifted effortlessly. So I saw that early evidence of God in my life … and I see it now every day of my life.”

I agree with Bledsoe who wrote, “Opening up about the role of faith in his life, and not being afraid to discuss his flaws, makes Kennedy seem more real than other politicians.”

After hearing more about Kennedy’s faith journey, his humble surrender and dependence on God, and his willingness to talk openly about his past addiction, I do believe RFK Jr. is sincere about wanting to Make America Healthy Again. Especially to discover why children and adults have so many more chronic illnesses and shorter lives than the rest of the world even though we’re one of the wealthiest countries.

What Are the Goals of MAHA?

If you would like to read more, I would encourage you to read RFK Jr.’s Top Health and Wellness Priorities As Doctors Share Input. The goal categories are Reforming Food Policy, Improving Healthcare Access, More Accountability for Pharma Companies, Restoring Medical Freedoms, Advocating for Physical Activity, Promoting Personal Accountability.

Here’s a little more from the Ingraham Angle Interview:

Kennedy: “I believe in freedom of choice. If you want to eat Twinkies, you ought to be able to eat them. But you ought to know what’s in them. So, a lot of what I’m going to do is about being transparent—radical transparency. What I’m about is I want people to understand and empower them to know that if you eat that, it may seem cheap, but it’s gonna cost you in the long run. You might get diabetes etc.”

We have 10,000 additives in our food. Europeans have 400. Many of our additives are illegal in Europe.

Ingraham asked if we were going to become a “nanny state.” She brought up that Pres. Trump likes Big Macs. “You’re not going to take those away, are you?” she asked him.

Kennedy: “McDonalds ought to be incentivized to use beef tallow fat when it’s cooking its Big Mac so that they’re good for people. Rather than using seed oils or some other cooking oils that are actually probably going to make you sicker. So, we want to do a number of things but not take away choice from people.”

“The one place where I would say that we need to really change programs is SNAP [Supplemenal Nutrition Assistance Program], food stamps, and school lunches because they are federal programs and, in many cases, we’re paying for it, and we shouldn’t be subsidizing people to eat poison!”

Kennedy’s message resonates with me. The young enthusiastic altruistic “Florence Nightingale R.D.” who became so disillusioned all those years ago, still has the burning desire to help people nutritionally fuel their body, God’s holy temple. As Kennedy says, and I echo, “For too long, we’ve been stuck in a passive disease management system that treats symptoms instead of addressing the root causes of illness.” 

Kennedy’s, and my, message is the same as it’s been since God created our bodies, “Your health is your responsibility. The government won’t fix it. Your doctor won’t fix it. Big pharma certainly won’t fix it. It’s on you.”

God will help anyone who is willing to help themselves. “The Bible is like food for the inner person. It is milk (1 Peter 2:2), solid food (Hebrews 5:11-14), bread (Matthew 4:4), and honey (Psalm 19:9-10).” Warren Wiersbe

“I think one’s feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.” Florence Nightingale

Why do you spend your money on junk food, your hard-earned cash on cotton candy? Listen to me, listen well: Eat only the best, fill yourself with only the finest. Pay attention, come close now, listen carefully to my life-giving, life-nourishing words. Is. 55:2-3 The Message

Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies. 1 Cor. 6:10-20

PS If you want to learn more about MAHA Moms here’s an interesting article. The ‘MAHA Moms’ Behind Kennedy – The Kennedy Beacon

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