I hate to get sick, which means I’m a big fan of vaccinations: I estimate I’ve gotten 21 since I moved here nine years ago, but I bet I undercounted. In order to protect people who actually can’t get vaccinations, we need a pretty high level of compliance. For those two reasons, I’m distressed that RFK is insinuating that vaccinations aren’t important, and not encouraging them. One of our goals for moving to Spain is to get out of here before flu season hits.

On the other hand…

…I do agree with other things RFK talks about. Those of us who have observed the crash in public health in the United States over the last 60 years find is a little hard to be very impressed by the usual experts. One of my friends told me she was so comfortable with the research over the past 20 years. The past 20 years! The US medical establishment has pretty much been getting an F-minus on public health over the past 20 years.

So the biggest problem with the establishment position RFK = wrong, mainstream doctors = right, is that it’s observably untrue. Instead of bolstering their influence on the public, this pronouncement just reminds everyone of the other untruths we have been told, such as that either party cares about working class jobs, or would take any action that discomfits major donors.

This came to my attention today because of an article about Vani Hari, aka the Food Babe, in the New York Times. Vani has a family and personal background as a prominent Democrat, but she’s working for RFK now because, like so many of us, she was able to turn her health around by changing her diet, and not in the way the doctors recommend, yet she never got establishment Democrats to support that message any more than Republicans would. Specifically, she worked closely with the Obamas in the 2012 presidential campaign, then Barack reneged on a promise to support GMO labeling and Michelle touted Subway as an example of a healthy food source.

Vani became famous in part by forcing industrial food purveyors to remove toxic ingredients using public pressure, and she’s had some big wins, including getting Kraft to remove that nasty yellow dye from macaroni and cheese. All the other first world countries already required Kraft to use paprika for coloration before Vani took them on, and now our kids get that advantage too.

Now that she has changed political sides, the left is going after Vani in a big way. One person quoted in the NYT article said: The desire to oversimplify and demonize what seems scary dovetails really well with a right-wing worldview. But Vani is not oversimplifying or demonizing, she’s sharing solutions that work. The chemicals in ultraprocessed foods combined with their base of highly industrialized, i.e. nutrient-free, farm products are demonstrably deleterious to public health.

The NYT also had this to say about Vani’s change of teams: [I]t has bewildered many on the progressive left who felt they owned what food historians call the good-food movement. So people who have come up with a group of things they think we should eat that has resulted in epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and dozens of autoimmune diseases, think because they branded that advice the “good-food movement” we should embrace it?

Results are more convincing that marketeering.

NYT also mentions that Trump supporters who once dismissed dietary interventions as part of the “nanny state” school of government are championing organic produce and trying to rid schools of ultraprocessed foods. That’s great news, right? In the context of the article, it sounds like the authors think it’s a negative.

I let a lot of the nonsense NYT and The Guardian write about nutrition rest unchallenged, but today I took the bait, and here I am, defending worm brain and his piece of the Trump destruction juggernaut. What a world.