A New Federal report Published by the Make America Healthy Again (Maha) Commission portrays the health of children as with alarming decline as a result of poor diet, chemical exposures, over -medicalization, a lack of physical activity and much more. Certain industrial groups, the American health care system and parental choices are largely blamed – while socio -economic factors that have shown to have an influence on many of these issues are hardly mentioned.
President Donald Trump asked the report in a February executive order Setting up the Maha committee, whose primary mission it is to tackle chronic diseases in children. Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is chairman of the committee.
The group’s report presents four main administrators of chronic childhood diseases, who blame the foods that children eat and their daily habits. It is aimed at ultra-processed food, referring to a 2021 study that has shown that almost 70% of an American’s calories come from this category and claims that those foods stimulate weight gain.
The report also says that children are overexposed to chemicals, take too many medicines, spend too little time on doing physical activity and being too focused on technology. Although the report is based on some responsibility for the food and pharmaceutical industry – which states that it has inappropriate influence on the food guidelines and drug studies – it also criticizes certain parental decisions.
For example, the report says that an increase in chronic childhood diseases is directly connected to children’s diets, and that dependence on ultracroced food “is a dramatic change since the 1960s, when most food was cooked at home with the help of whole ingredients” – a nod to demographic changes in which more women in the staff are at home than at home with children.
Read more: How getting a baby changes under Trump
It says that more than a third of parents leave electronic devices that are driven into the bedrooms of their children at night, disrupting their sleep.
It adds that children are partially meditated because of “well -intended doctors and parents who try to help a child.”
It also says that pregnant mothers eat too much ultracroced food; that pesticides, microplastics and pollutants are often found in the blood and urine of children and pregnant women; And that almost every breast milk sample tested in America contains a level of persistent organic pollutants. ”
The authors of the report claim that teenagers in single -parent families tend to have higher rates of fear, depression and ADHD than those in two -lover households, with reference to studies from 2017 and 2015. “Gentle parenthood”, a popular parenting style that emphasizes empathy and respect, also attracts their criticism; The authors mention one report that and the trauma-inspired care “potentially normal emotions pathologize, undermine resilience and contribute to rising anxiety and depression figures in children and teenagers.”
Some praised the broad nature of the report and the fact that it draws attention to the many obstacles that families have in raising healthy children. “Parents are established to fail,” says Scott Faber, senior vice president of government affairs for the Environmental Working Group, a national non -profit organization that focuses on food, agriculture and the environment. “There are just too few good choices and too many bad choices.”
Read more: When fighting with your insurance company, there will be a full -time job
The report is an example of the Make America Remory Roter platform, which focuses on how food and chemicals make people less healthy. The movement has supporters in surgeon -general nominated Dr. Casey means and in one Vocal contingent of mothers throughout the country. Like many policy measures in the Trump government, it seems to return to a while decades ago, the leaders of the movement, things were better in America – a statement that is that is In a large part untrue When it comes to health.
“In this report there are these ideas that we need to return to a nostalgic, existing state where children did not have mobile phones, slept more and went camping,” says Peter Lurie, the president and executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a non-profit focused on food safety, 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 been investigated for the worsening of the health of children in America and the lifestyle choices has blamed. The Biden Administration has released a report About diet -related diseasesand the Obama government had a Task Force about obesity in children who a report submitted to the president. However, the Maha committee’s report differs that it hardly mentions the socio -economic factors that make obesity and childhood diseases worse, such as a lack of access to healthy food or green space.
People may know what is healthy, but may not have easy access to nutritious food due to a lack of supermarkets where they live; They may want their children to spend more time outside, but are concerned about crime or a lack of green space. “An approach is to invest in these communities, so that people have access to the resources they need,” says Nour Makarem, co-leader of the Chronic Disease Unit at the Mailman School of Public Health of Columbia University.
The committee now has 80 days to come up with a strategy for improving the health of American children based on the report. But some critics point out that efforts to find solutions for some of the problems described by the report have been cut by the current administration.
The report comes in the midst of drastic cuts or eliminations of many government programs that work on solving some of these problems. Dismissed decimated the chronic Disease Prevention Center in the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Trump administration program That brought food to schools of local farms. Shortly before the Maha report was released, the American House of Representatives approved a bill that it would Seriously reducing financing To the additional food utility or understand, which helps families with a low income to buy food.
Clinical tests and studies looking at the prevention of chronic diseases and ways to help people gain access to healthy food, are cut into the success of subsidies by the government of the American National Institutes of Health and other sources, Makarem adds.
“I don’t know that we have identified the most innovative approaches to know what is healthy and that people have healthy behavior,” she says. “Nothing can be achieved without research and clinical examinations.”
#Maha #report #health #children