By Thérèse Boudreaux | The Center Square
(Worthy News) – A new report from the Make America Healthy Again commission links the childhood chronic disease epidemic to pesticides, food additives and undue corporate influence on health regulations.
But its recommended reforms shy away from making changes to industry practices, instead focusing on improving dietary guidelines and pharmaceutical trials.
National Institutes of Health director Jay Bhattacharya, a member of the MAHA commission, told reporters that the MAHA report is “not, in any way, an attack on the American farmers or industry.”
“What this is is a commitment to get excellent answers, excellent science, so that we can enable people to do the right thing,” he added.
According to the report, more than 40% of America’s 73 million children have at least one chronic health disease, such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, asthma, food allergies, and mental illness. Antidepressant prescriptions for children in America have also skyrocketed 1,400% between 1987 and 2014.
The report suggests that widespread chronic stress and physical inactivity, coupled with overmedicalization and ultra-processed foods, have all contributed to the highest ever rates of chronic illness in American adolescents.
“We spend on healthcare two to three times what other nations spend, about $4.5 trillion a year, and we have the worst outcomes of any developed nation,” head of U.S. Health and Human Services and the MAHA commission Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told reporters Thursday.
The report suggests federal health agencies reevaluate the current childhood vaccine schedule and conduct more rigorous clinical trials on vaccines, as well as push for more studies on how specific medications affect children versus adults.
But although the document condemns industry-funded – and sometimes entirely ghostwritten – research, it recommends that the government work with the private sector to conduct more studies on the potential links between chemical exposure and chronic illness.
The goal, Kennedy has said, is to ensure that health reforms do not adversely impact the agricultural and private sectors, effectively ruling out a future ban on the controversial and widely-used pesticide glyphosate.
“Precipitous changes in agricultural practices could have an adverse impact on American agriculture and the domestic and global food supply,” the report notes.
United States Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins reiterated this objective in her response to the report’s release.
“America’s farmers and ranchers dedicate their lives to the noble cause of feeding their country and the world, and in doing so have created the safest and most abundant and affordable food supply in the world,” Rollins said. “We are working to make sure our kids and families are consuming the healthiest food we produce.”
Over the next 90 days, the MAHA commission will develop policy recommendations based on the findings.
Copyright 1999-2025 Worthy News. This article was originally published on Worthy News and was reproduced with permission.
More Worthy News
The Temple Institute in Jerusalem issued an extensive clarification on Monday following widespread misinformation concerning recent reports about a red heifer and the production of ritual ashes—an act central to biblical purity laws and, for many religious observers, deeply symbolic in the context of prophetic events.
The United States is moving aggressively to secure UN Security Council authorization for the new International Stabilization Force (ISF) in Gaza, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio saying Wednesday that Washington is “optimistic” that the draft resolution will advance within days — paving the way for deployment at the start of 2026.
With the 41-day government shutdown now set to end, President Donald Trump is preparing to launch an aggressive new healthcare reform push that the White House says will finally replace the “broken” Obamacare system Democrats created.
President Donald Trump has formally asked Israeli President Isaac Herzog to grant a full pardon to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, marking the strongest U.S. intervention yet in the long-running corruption trial that has deeply polarized Israeli society.
U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) announced that American forces, working alongside local Syrian partners, conducted more than 22 counterterrorism operations against ISIS between October 1 and November 6, significantly degrading the terror group’s operational capabilities across the region.
Archaeologists in the Czech capital have begun exhuming mass graves containing political prisoners executed under Czechoslovakia’s communist regime, in a major effort to identify victims whose resting places have remained unknown for more than seven decades.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has moved to contain mounting public anger over a major corruption scandal in the energy sector by firing two ministers accused of involvement in a vast bribery scheme, while Russian-affiliated churches report increased pressure during wartime.