RFK Jr. Says that Americans were healthier when his uncle was president. Is he right?

Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Says often that Americans were healthier when he was a child in the 50s and 60s. People were not so overweight or used so many medicines. Diabetes and autism in children were unheard of. Food was fresh and healthy.

Life Development Researcher Dr. Steven Woolf Is Kennedy’s age and he remembers some other characteristics of that time. “We were driven around in cars with no safety belts. There were no car seats; there were no airbags,” he says. “People smoked in aircraft; they smoked in restaurants.”

Woolf, a professor Emeritus at the University University of Virginia, says that some concerns about which Kennedy speaks when he discusses the health of America, but that he lacks the most important context, gets facts wrong and often embraces policy that undermines his own priorities.

The Ministry of Health and Human Services did not respond to the detailed request of NPR to comment on this story.

Set the scene

The mid -20th century is the era where Kennedy and President Trump nod with the “again” of the Make America Great (and Healthy) again slogans.

“There is some basis for the fact that America was healthier at the time,” acknowledges Natalia Mehlman PetrzelaA history professor at the new school in New York. “Americans nowadays have much more chronic disease than when he was a child, and there is much more processed food nowadays; rates from obesity are very high.”

But, she says: “There is also some compensatory proof that the imagination really breaks through that this was an era of much more widespread health.”

To begin with, the American life expectancy in 1960 Was almost ten years shorter than it is today: 69.7 years. And the most important causes of death were in fact chronic diseases.

In 1963, for example: “Two of the three dead in the United States were caused by three chronic diseases: heart disease, cancer and stroke,” says Woolf. “So it is hardly the case that chronic illness was a non-issue when he was a child.”

Other important context: health insurance was a relatively new invention, women started to become an important part of the workforce and racial segregation was still a reality in a large part of the country. For black Americans, life expectancy was considerably shorter in 1960 Only 63.6 years.

Food space age

Then there is food. Although processed foods were not nearly as common as they are now, Petrzela says that frozen and plank -stable food was also steeped in the romance of science and technology.

“This is a time when everyone had freezers and refrigerators for the first time, so it was almost a flex to be able to serve those foods,” she says. Jell-O became mainstream and the orange drink mix mix and early energy bars were created in this era. “They all came from the fact that, such as:” Oh, this is what they eat in space. “Anyway?” This is made in a laboratory. “

Work it out

The strongest basis for Kennedy’s nostalgia is the push around physical education programs in that period, says Petrzela, who wrote the book, Fit Nation: The Winins and Pains of America’s exercise obsession.

Even before John F. Kennedy was sworn in, he wrote one Sport Illustrated Cover Story As President-Elect in 1960, the Americans calls on to record it.

“Our growing softness, our increasing lack of physical fitness, is a threat to our safety,” he wrote. “The physical fitness of our citizens is an essential condition for the awareness of America of its full potential as a nation, and for the possibility of each individual citizen to make full and fruitful use of his capacities.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Front, with his parents and brothers and sisters on his way to deliver gifts to his aunt and uncle after the birth of his cousin John F. Kennedy, Jr. In November 1960.

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As President, he helped to promote sensitivity that “practice is virtuous and good and makes you a good American,” says Petrzela.

However, it is worth pointing out that the strategies of secretary Kennedy are at odds with other important priorities of his uncle as president. “JFK loved PE and Push -ups and Sit -Ups and so -he also loved vaccines,” she says. “Remember that these are the presidents of JFK and Lyndon Johnson – this is the great society,” who all was about new, large government policy programs that hoped to tackle, to promote civil rights and more.

What has happened since then?

Nowadays the American life expectancy 77.5 years. That has improved considerably since the 1960s, but not as much or as fast as in other comparable rich countries.

First, let’s look at the reasons for the improvements. The lack of seat belts and smoking indoors that Woolf remembers from his youth? The efforts for public health and new laws have contributed to significant progress there – people who would have died of lung cancer or were saved in car accidents because of those changes.

Black Americans have also made a profit in life expectancy, although there are racial gaps – the current life expectancy for this group 72.8 years. “The place where we may have made the most obvious progress in health since 1960 is that the circumstances of black Americans were radically improved by the health reforms that came from the civil rights movement,” says Elizabeth Wigley-FieldA mortality -Demograph at the University of Minnesota.

There have also been great medical innovations, especially with cancer. “We have new drugs and medical technologies that have been very, very effective and successful,” explains Wigley-Field, adding: “You would hope that that would be true in 60 years of medical progress.”

Although chronic diseases are now a bigger problem, that is a trend that has been going on for more than a century, before and after the uncle of secretary Kennedy was president, says Woolf. “Earlier in the 1900s, the most important causes of death were infectious diseases, but while we developed antibiotics and vaccines, infectious diseases became less a threat and rose chronic diseases in importance,” he explains.

RFK Jr.’s approach to these problems

Many people who study the relatively short life expectancy of America compared to other developed countries are stunned by the policy approach to Kennedy of the problem.

“Sometimes he says sentences that are logical, such as:” We have an increase in chronic diseases, “says Wigley-Field. But the” Funhouse Mirror aspect, “she says, is that” all the things you have to do are the exact opposite of what his administration does for public health. “

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In April 2024, when he was on his way to President.

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The biggest step of Kennedy as a secretary so far was, for example, to reduce federal health work by around 25%through shooting and buyouts. In one Social Media Video He announced his plans to restructure the agency, he implied that the poor health and life expectancy of America could be attributed to the staff he supervises: “The speed of chronic diseases and cancer has increased dramatically as our department has grown – our lifespan has fallen.”

Woolf says that the connection is not logical, especially if you come up with part of the expertise that Kennedy walks out. “The head office in our federal government for dealing with smoking and health is closed by Kennedy,” says Woolf and notes that smoking is still the leading avoidable cause of death in the US

He adds that in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Large centers on chronic diseases themselves are closed.” And at the National Institutes for Health, “a large part of the research portfolio that is aimed at tackling how to reduce the burden of chronic diseases – the financing is reduced.” HHS did not respond to NPR’s request for comments on cutbacks on teams that seem relevant to the priorities of Kennedy.

It is difficult to get out of those cuts with “a policy agenda that really wants to make America healthier,” adds Woolf. “Solving the problem with ultra -processed foods and dyes will have a marginal advantage. Is it worthwhile to do? Of course. But that will not move the needle when improving chronic diseases or extending our life expectancy.”

Wrigley-Field adds that understanding and tackling the reasons for the long life expectancy of the US is a lively scientific conversation. “Some debates are about: how much of this is a story about external causes of death – overdoses drugs, murders, autocollations? Those things all have a really disproportionate impact on life expectancy because they tend to kill people if they are quite young, where they had not died, they had many decades of life.”

Increasingly, she says, there is insight that another contributing factor is delayed scientific progress in reducing deaths due to heart attacks and heart disorders “that such great murderers are in the United States.”

That debate is somewhat disputed when both financing for scientific research and for preventing deaths from injuries and overdoses are cut by secretary Kennedy in his overhaul of HHS. That is why his discussion about returning to good health of the sixties and improving life expectancy for many experts in the field is not convincing.

For Wigley-Field: “There is only this mismatch between the words and the actions.”