3 things RFK Jr. gets right about American health — even if you can’t stand him

There's something almost paradoxical about finding scientific clarity in the most politically radioactive figure of our era. The article, available at https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/6019645-real-food-national-guidelines/, makes a compelling case that RFK Jr.'s core dietary arguments—that ultra-processed foods are driving a chronic disease epidemic—don't require us to embrace the man to embrace the message. It's like discovering that a broken clock is right twice a day, except this clock is pointing at a systemic failure that's been hiding in plain sight for decades. The deeper weirdness here is the biological mismatch thesis. Our genomes are essentially the same hardware that evolved hunting and gathering on the savanna, yet we're now running software that includes high-fructose corn syrup, artificial colorings, and preservatives engineered in laboratories. The chronic disease epidemic—obesity, diabetes, autoimmune conditions—reads less like a series of individual failures and more like a system-wide error message from bodies trying to process signals they were never built to decode. It's as if we've plugged a 21st-century power grid into a 10,000-year-old circuit board. What's genuinely fascinating is how the article navigates the cognitive dissonance. It acknowledges that political tribalism has made it nearly impossible to have a rational conversation about food policy, yet the data on ultra-processed foods is mounting with the inevitability of a gravitational collapse. The author, Dan Corrigan, wisely separates the messenger from the message—a radical act of intellectual hygiene in an era where we're conditioned to reject entire idea clusters based on their source. Perhaps the most unsettling implication is what this says about our relationship with reality itself. We've built a food system so divorced from natural processes that we've essentially created a parallel nutrition universe—one where "food" is defined by regulatory loopholes and marketing departments rather than biological utility. The article suggests that fixing this isn't just a policy problem; it's an existential one. Because if we can't trust that the substances we put into our bodies are actually food, what else have we accepted on faith?