RFK, Jr. made it about the chronic disease disaster facing us, our children

'This is the most important issue, therefore it has the potential to bring us together.'

Bobby Kennedy spent the last thirty minutes of his announcement suspending his campaign on the chronic disease crisis in America. His words were genuine and moving. He told us he was putting children first. By suspending his campaign, he would be able to put this catastrophe into the forefront of political arena. News sources that totally ignored him previously, now have to at least acknowledge his presence.

1:21:25

Three great causes drove me to enter this race in the first place. Primarily, and these are the three causes that persuaded me to leave the Democratic Party and run as an independent and now to throw my support to President Trump.

The causes were free speech, the war in Ukraine and the war on our children. . . .

Less than two hours after President Trump narrowly escaped assassination, Calley Means called me on my cell phone, I was in Las Vegas. Calley is arguably the leading advocate for food safety, for soil regeneration and for ending the chronic disease epidemic that is destroying America’s health and ruining our economy. 

Calley has exposed the insidious corruption at the FDA and the NIH, the HHS and the USDA that has caused the epidemic.

Calley had been working on and off for my campaign, advising me on those subjects since the beginning. And those subjects have been my primary focus for the last 20 years.

I was delighted when Calley told me that day that he had also been advising President Trump.

He told me President Trump was anxious to talk to me about chronic disease and other subjects, and to explore avenues of cooperation.

He asked if I would take a call from the President. President Trump telephoned me a few minutes later, and I met with him the following day. A few weeks later, I met again with President Trump and his family members and close advisors in Florida.

In a series of long, intense discussions, I was surprised to discover that we are aligned on many key issues. In those meetings, he suggested that we join forces as a Unity Party. We talked about Abraham  Lincoln’s team of rivals.

That arrangement would allow us to disagree publicly and privately and furiously, if need be on issues over which we differ, while working together on the existential issues upon which we are in concordance. . . .

We are aligned with each other on other key issues .  . .ending the childhood disease epidemic. . . unraveling the corporate capture of our regulatory agencies . . .

. . . Vice President Harris decline to meet or even to speak with me.

Suspending my candidacy is a heart-rending for me, but I’m convinced that it’s the best hope for ending the Ukraine War and ending the chronic disease epidemic that is eroding our nations vitality from the inside, and for finally protecting free speech.

I feel a moral obligation to use this opportunity to save millions of American children, above all things.

In case some of you don’t realize how dire the condition is of our children’s health and chronic disease in general, I would urge you to view Tucker Carlson’s interview with Calley Means and his sister, Dr. Casey Means, who is a top graduate of her class at Stanford Medical School

This is an issue that affects all of us far more directly and urgently than any culture war issue and all the other issues that we obsess on and that are tearing apart our country. 

This is the most important issue, therefore it has the potential to bring us together. So let me share a little bit about why I feel it is so urgent.

Today two-thirds—we pay, we spend more health care than any country on earth, twice what they pay in Europe, and yet we have the worst health outcomes of any nation in the world.

We’re about seventy-ninth in health outcomes, behind Costa Rica and Nicaragua and Mongolia and other countries.

Nobody has a chronic disease burden like we have, and during the COVID epidemic, we had the highest body count of any country in the world.

We had 16 percent of the COVID deaths, and we only have 4.2 percent of the world’s population.

And CDC says that’s because we are the sickest people on earth. We have the highest chronic disease rate on earth and for the average American who died from COVID had 3.8 chronic diseases.

So these were people who had immune system collapse, who had mitochondrial dysfunction, and no other country has anything like this.

Two-thirds of American adults and children suffer from chronic health issues.

50 years ago, that number was less than one percent. So we’ve gone from one percent to 66 percent.

In America, 74 percent of Americans now are overweight or obese, and 50 percent of our children.

120 years ago, when somebody was obese, they were sent to the circus. There were case reports done about them. Obesity was almost unknown.

In Japan, childhood obesity rate is three percent, compared to 50 percent here. 

Half of Americans have pre-diabetes or Type II diabetes. When my uncles was President and I was a boy, juvenile diabetes was effectively nonexistent.

A typical pediatrician would see one case of diabetes during his entire career, 40 or 50 year career.

Today one out of ever three kids who walks through his office door is diabetic or pre diabetic.

And the mitochondrial disorder that causes diabetes is also causing Alzheimer’s, which is now classified as diabetes, and it’s costing this country more than our military budget every year.

There’s been an explosion of neurological illness that I never saw as kid, ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, Tourette’s syndrome, narcolepsy, ASD, Aspegers, autism.

In the year 2000, rate was one in 1,500. Now autism rates in kids are one in 36, according to CDC  nationally.

Nobody’s talking about this.

One in every 22 kids in California has autism.  and this is a crisis: that 77% of our kids cannot or are too disabled to serve in the United States military. What is happening to our country, and why isn't this in the headlines every single day?

There's nobody else in the world that is experiencing this. This is only happening in America. About 18%, and by the way, you know, there has been no change in diagnosis, which the industry sometimes likes to say, there has been no change in screening. This is a change in incidence.

In my generation of 70-year-old men, the odds and rates [of autism] are about one in 10,000. In my kids’ generation, one in 34.

I'll repeat: in California, 1 in 22. Why are we letting this happen? Why are we allowing this to happen to our children? These are the most precious assets that we have in this country. How can we let this happen to them?

About 18% of American teens now have fatty liver disease. That's like one out of every five. That disease, when I was a kid, only affected late-stage alcoholics who were elderly. Cancer rates are skyrocketing in the young and the old. Young adult cancers are up 79%.

One in four American women is on antidepressant medication, 40% of teen teens have a mental health diagnosis, and 15% of high schoolers are on Adderall, and half a million children on SSRIs.

So what's causing this suffering? I'll name two culprits. First and the worst is ultra-processed food. About 70% of American children's diet is ultra-processed. That means industrial manufactured in factories. These foods consist primarily of processed sugar, ultra-processed grains, and seed oils.

Laboratory scientists who have formed many of them formerly worked for the cigarette industry, which purchased all the big food companies in the 1970s and ‘80s, deployed thousands of scientists to figure out chemicals, new chemicals, to make the food more addictive. And these ingredients didn't exist 100 years ago.

Humans aren't biologically adapted to eat them. A hundred of these chemicals are now banned in Europe but are ubiquitous in American processed foods. The second culprit is toxic chemicals in our food, our medicine, and our environment. Pesticides, food additives, pharmaceutical drugs, and toxic waste permeate every cell of our bodies.

This assault on our children's cells and hormones is unrelenting. And to name just one problem, many of these chemicals increase estrogen. Because young children are ingesting so many of these hormone disruptors, America's puberty rate is now occurring at age 10 to 13, which is six years earlier than girls were reaching puberty in 1900.

Our country has the earliest puberty rates of any continent on the earth, and no, this isn't because of better nutrition. This is not normal. Breast cancer is also estrogen-driven, and it now strikes one in eight women. We are mass-poisoning all of our children and our adults.

Considering the grievous human cause of this tragic epidemic of chronic disease, it seems almost crass to mention the damage it does to our economy. But I'll say it is crippling the nation's finances. When my uncle was president, our country spent zero dollars on chronic disease. Today, government healthcare spending is almost all for chronic disease, and it's double the military budget, and it is the fastest-growing budget item in the federal budget.

Chronic disease costs more to the economy as a whole, costs at least $4 trillion—five times our military budget. And that's a 20% drag on everything we do and everything we aspire to.

Poor and minority communities suffer disproportionately. People who worry about DEI or about, you know, bigotry of any kind, this dwarfs anything. We are poisoning the poor. We are systematically poisoning minorities across this country. Industry lobbyists have made sure that most of the food stamp lunch program, about 70% of food stamps, and about 70% or 77% of school lunches are processed foods.

There's no vegetables. There's nothing that you would wanna eat. We are just poisoning the poor citizens, and that's why they have the highest chronic disease burden of anybody, any demographic in our country, and the highest in the world. The same food industry lobbied to make sure that nearly all agricultural subsidies are owed to commodity crops that are the feedstock of the processed food industry.

These policies are destroying small farms, and they're destroying our soils. We give, we give about, I think, eight times as much in subsidies to tobacco than we do to fruits and vegetables. It makes no sense. If we want a healthy country, the good news is that we can change all this.

We can change it very, very quickly. America can get healthy again. To do that, we need to do three things. First, we need to root out the corruption in our health agencies. Second, we need to change incentives in our healthcare system. And third, we need to inspire Americans to get healthy again.

Eighty percent of NIH grants go to people who have conflicts of interest. These are the people virtually everybody who sits — you know who Joe Biden just appointed a new panel to NIH to decide food recommendations.

And they're all people who are from the industry. They're all people who are from the processed food companies. They're deciding what Americans, you know, hear is healthy. And the recommendations on the food pyramid, and what goes to our school lunch programs, which would go to the, you know, the program, the SNAP program, the food stamp programs, they're all corrupted and conflicted individuals.

These agencies, the FDA, USDA, and CDC — all of them are controlled by giant for-profit corporations. Seventy-five percent of the FDA's funding doesn't come from taxpayers. It comes from pharma. And pharma executives and consultants and lobbyists cycle in and out of these agencies. With President Trump's backing, I'm gonna change that.

We're gonna staff these agencies with honest scientists and doctors who are free from industry funding. We're gonna make sure the decisions of consumers, doctors, and patients are informed by unbiased science. A sick child is the best thing for the pharmaceutical industry. When American children or adults get sick with a chronic condition, they’re put on medication for their entire life.

Imagine what will happen when Medicare starts paying for Ozempic, which costs $1,500 a month—and it's being recommended for children as young as 6—all for a condition, obesity, that is completely preventable and barely even existed 100 years ago. And 74% of Americans are obese.

The cost if all of them took their Ozempic prescription is $3 trillion a year. This is a drug that is made by Novo Nordisk, the biggest company in Europe. It’s a Danish company, and the Danish government does not recommend it. It recommends change in diet to treat obesity and exercise. And in our country, the recommendation now is for Ozempic to children at age 6.

Novo Nordisk is the biggest company in Europe, and virtually its entire value is based upon its projections of what it's gonna sell, of the Ozempic it's gonna sell to America. And we have — the food lobbyists have a bill in front of Congress today that is backed by the White House, backed by Vice President Harris and President Biden, to to allow this to happen.

This $3 trillion cost is gonna bankrupt our country. For a fraction of that amount, we could buy organic food for every American family, three meals a day, and eliminate diabetes altogether. We're gonna bring healthy food back to school lunches. We're gonna stop subsidizing the worst foods with our agricultural subsidies.

We're gonna get toxic chemicals out of our food. We're gonna reform the entire food system. And for that, we need new leadership in Washington because, unfortunately, both the Democrats and the Republican parties are in cahoots with the Big Food producers, Big Pharma and Big Ag, which are among the DNC's major donors. Vice President Harris has expressed no interest in addressing this issue. Four more years of Democratic rule will complete the consolidation of corporate and the neocon power, and our children will be the ones who suffer most.

I got involved with chronic disease 20 years ago, not because I chose to or wanted to. It was essentially thrust upon me. It was an issue that should have been central to the environmental movement. I was a central leader at that time, but it was widely ignored by all the institutions, including the NGOs, who should have been protecting our kids against toxins. It was an orphaned issue, and I had a weakness for orphans.

I watched generations of children get sicker and sicker. I had 11 siblings, and I have seven kids myself. I was conscious of what was happening in their classrooms and to their friends, and I watched these sick kids, these damaged kids — in that generation, almost all of them are damaged. And nobody in power seemed to care or to even notice.

For 19 years, I prayed every morning that God would put me in a position to end this calamity. The chronic disease crisis was one of the primary reasons for my running for president, along with ending the censorship and the Ukraine war. It's the reason I've made the heart-wrenching decision to suspend my campaign and to support President Trump.

This decision is agonizing for me because of the difficulties it causes my wife and my children and my friends. But I have the certainty that this is what I'm meant to do, and that certainty gives me internal peace even in storms. If I'm given the chance to fix the chronic disease crisis and reform our food production, I promise that within two years, we will watch the chronic disease burden lift dramatically.

We will make Americans healthy again. Within four years, America will be a healthy country. We will be stronger, more resilient, more optimistic, and happier. I won't fail in doing this. Ultimately, the future, however it happens, is in God's hands and in the hands of the American voters and those of President Trump. If President Trump is elected and honors his word, the vast burden of chronic disease that now demoralizes and bankrupts the country will disappear. This is a spiritual journey for me.

I reached my decision through deep prayer, through a hard-nosed logic, and I asked myself, “What choices must I make to maximize my chances to save America's children and restore national health?” I felt that if I refused this opportunity, I would not be able to look myself in the mirror, knowing that I could have saved lives of countless children and reversed this country's chronic disease epidemic.

I'm 70 years old. I may have a decade to be effective. I can't imagine that a President Harris would allow me or anyone to solve these dire problems. After eight years of President Harris, any opportunity for me to fix the problem will be out of my reach forever.

President Trump has told me that he wants this to be his legacy. I'm choosing to believe that this time he will follow through. His son, his biggest donors, his closest friends all support this objective. My joining the Trump campaign will be a difficult sacrifice for my wife and children but worthwhile if there's even a small chance of saving these kids.

Ultimately, the only thing that will save our country and our children is if we choose to love our kids more than we hate each other. That's why I launched my campaign to unify America.

My dad and uncle made such an enduring mark on the character of our nation, not so much because of any particular policies that they promoted, but because they were able to inspire profound love for our country and to fortify our sense of ourselves as a national community held together by ideals.

They were able to put their love into the intentions and hearts of ordinary Americans and to unify a national populist movement of Americans, blacks and whites, Hispanics, urban and rural Americans. They inspired affection and love and high hopes and a culture of kindness that continue to radiate among Americans in their memory.

That's the spirit on which I ran my campaign and that I intend to bring into the campaign of President Trump. Instead of vitriol and polarization, I will appeal to the values that unite us, the goals that we could achieve if only we weren't at each other's throats. The most unifying theme for all Americans is that we all love our children.

If we all unite around that issue now, we can finally give them the protection, the health, and the future that they deserve. Thank you all very much.