Donald Trump associate and noted health nut Robert F. Kennedy Jr. still has federal health regulators in his crosshairs.
On Wednesday, RFK — who's tipped to have a major role in Trump's administration — said that there are entire departments within the Food and Drug Administration that "have to go," because they're "not doing their job, they're not protecting our kids."
"Why do we have Froot Loops in this country that have 18 or 19 ingredients and you go to Canada and it's got two or three," the Kennedy scion told an MSNBC reporter on air.
That's not true, by the way: Kellogg Froot Loops sold in Canada have dozens of ingredients too, The Huffington Post notes. But the American version does contain artificial dyes instead of natural ones, for which Kellogg has come under fire for not removing from its US products as it once promised it would.
The FDA has insisted that the ingredients are safe, but the Democratic Governor of California Gavin Newsom recently banned several of these food dyes from meals served in school cafeterias, underscoring the seriousness of the debate, all of which RFK marvelously misconstrued as boiling down the number of ingredients used in a breakfast cereal.
This misconstruction sums up RFK's whole deal. He can be right about some things — yes, maybe our food regulators do need an overhaul, from all the listeria scares lately to why American diets are so notoriously poor — but he's also a shotgun of erratic beliefs, some of which hit the mark and others which aren't based in reality at all, such as his dangerous touting of anti-vaccine conspiracies.
For a round-up of RFK's grudge against the FDA, read this tweet of his from two weeks back, in which he claims the agency is suppressing everything from "raw milk" to "sunshine." (We're talking about a guy who admitted he had brain worms and attempted to eat roadkill bear meat, after all.)
The upshot, though, is that however sincere his health-rejuvenating mission may be, it's dangerously predicated on the rhetoric of gutting federal regulators.
To that end: while the "Make America Healthy Again" proponent is adamant that he'll clear out the FDA and other bureaucrats — in a similar tone to how Trump once promised to "drain the swamp" — RFK said he wouldn't eliminate these government agencies, since it takes congressional approval. And besides, he doesn't need to.
"I can get the corruption out of the agencies. It's what I've been doing for forty years," RFK said. "Once they're not corrupt, once Americans are getting good signs and they're allowed to make their own choices, they're going to get a lot healthier."
Still, it's not clear RFK will get the chance to do any of this.
Howard Lutnick, co-chair of the Trump transition team, said just over a week ago that Kennedy wouldn't be chosen as Trump's secretary of the Department of Health and Human services, though he did express enthusiasm for some of his ideas. In response, RFK later claimed that the incoming president privately assured him that he'd have a role in the White House.
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