Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was in Martinsburg, West Virginia, to celebrate the state's passage of new laws banning food dyes, and to announce changes to SNAP waivers.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Thank you, everybody.
00:09And thank you, Governor Morris.
00:11I'm very, very happy to be here at St. Joseph's, and I'm really happy to be here in West Virginia.
00:20I just want to say a few words about West Virginia, because West Virginia is a state
00:26that holds a special place in the hearts of every Kennedy.
00:32In the 1960 campaign, I was living in McLean, Virginia, but my parents disappeared into
00:39West Virginia for about six weeks, and we didn't see them.
00:45As well as all of my aunts, my uncle, President Kennedy, who was then in the Senate and was
00:50running for president, and the consensus wisdom around the country was that a Roman
00:59Catholic could not be elected President of the United States.
01:03Al Smith had run against President Roosevelt.
01:05He was a Catholic from New York, Catholic governor, very, very popular.
01:10And when people found out that he was Catholic, there was a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan,
01:16where crosses burned all across the country, and he lost the election catastrophically.
01:23And people just felt, Americans felt, and the pundits all felt that America would never
01:30elect a Catholic president.
01:32When my uncle decided to run for president, he knew that he had to win West Virginia.
01:38West Virginia had the lowest number of Catholics, less than 2% of the population was Catholic.
01:46And it was thought to be a place where there was a lot of anti-Catholic prejudice, and
01:52it voted overwhelmingly against Al Smith.
01:55It was critical to my uncle's campaign that he win this state and show the country that
02:00a Catholic could win the presidency.
02:04He came down to West Virginia, and his objective was to shake the hands of every person in
02:11West Virginia, and I think he came very close.
02:16And my parents came down, my uncles, my aunts, luckily we had a lot of Kennedys.
02:23And they all came down, and they spent time really getting to know the people in West
02:27Virginia, and understanding the issues in the state, the problems, and those things
02:33stayed with him throughout his presidency.
02:38And on election day, he won the state of West Virginia overwhelmingly.
02:44And during his presidency, he always believed that he would not be president if he had not
02:54won this state.
02:57And he never forgot that relationship and that bond that he had formed and that so many
03:02members of my family had formed with the people in this state, the affection and the warmth
03:09with which they were greeted and embraced.
03:13And it's something that now, 70 years later, everybody in our family has this very, very
03:20strong affection and bond to this state.
03:24And I've been lucky enough that I've been able to spend a lot of my career doing work
03:29in this state, in the mining country, and trying to end pollution and give people a
03:36chance to live healthier lives.
03:39I want to thank Governor Morrissey for his visionary leadership.
03:45I got to know Governor Morrissey early in the transition.
03:50We were both down in Palm Beach working on the transition in Mar-a-Lago, and we were
03:56both invited to stay during that time at Dr. Haas's house.
04:00And I got to know, I said to Governor Morrissey the first time I saw him, I said, you look
04:07like you ate Governor Morrissey.
04:13And there was a lot of talk about getting healthy again, and I'm very happy that he's
04:18invited me to be his personal trainer.
04:22And I am going to put him on a really rigorous regimen, and we're going to put him on a carnivore
04:35diet.
04:36We're going to make him do, raise your hand if you want Governor Morrissey to do a public
04:43weigh-in once a month.
04:49And then when he's lost 30 pounds, I'm going to come back to the state and do a celebration
04:55and a public weigh-in with him.
05:03You're welcome, Denise.
05:10We have a public health crisis in this country, and unfortunately West Virginia is leading
05:26the way.
05:27There's the highest obesity rate of any state in our country.
05:31This year you pulled ahead of Mississippi as the highest rate of chronic disease in
05:38the country.
05:40And so I'm very, very grateful to Governor Morrissey for his visionary leadership in
05:46getting West Virginia to lead the way in transitioning off of processed foods.
05:53When my uncle was president, 3% of Americans had chronic disease.
05:59We spent zero on chronic disease in this country.
06:03Zero.
06:04There were no, there was no medications for it.
06:07Today we spend, we spend $1.3 trillion on chronic disease every year.
06:15It's about 90% of our health care budget.
06:19And you know, for most of my life, the Republicans and Democrats have been fighting about a health
06:25care plan, about treatment, really a sick care plan, about how to treat all this illness.
06:33Should it be Obamacare, the affordable health plan?
06:39Should it be public-private partnership?
06:42Should it be a single payer?
06:44These are what the big battles that you read about on Capitol Hill.
06:48The real battle is that we're getting sicker and sicker every year.
06:52No matter, and it's really just a debate about who's going to pay the treatment.
06:58Nobody has been focused on how do we get ourselves less sick.
07:02And it's like moving deck chairs around on the Titanic.
07:06No matter what you do, our country is going to go bankrupt.
07:10It's now, you know, when I was a kid, diabetes rates in children were almost zero.
07:16Juvenile diabetes, a typical pediatrician would see one case of diabetes in his lifetime
07:23over a 40 or 50-year career.
07:26Today, one out of every three kids who walk through his office door is pre-diabetic or
07:32diabetic.
07:3338% of teens are now diabetic, 50% of adults.
07:39A few years ago, it's not a mystery about where this is coming from, 20 years ago there
07:45was no diabetes in China.
07:47Today, 50% of the population is diabetic.
07:52Why is that?
07:53They built 20,000 fast food joints in China and started selling American processed food.
08:00And this, it is costing us, we are now paying more just for diabetes, mitochondrial dysfunction,
08:08than we are for our military.
08:11And, you know, financially, it is bankrupting our country.
08:15We're now spending more to service our debt, and the biggest piece of that debt is coming
08:20from health care.
08:22We're now paying more to service it than we are for our military budget.
08:28Within about 10 years, if we continue on this trajectory, 50 cents out of every tax dollar
08:34that you pay to the federal government is going to go to servicing the debt.
08:40Within 15 years, 100%.
08:44It's not sustainable.
08:46It's existential.
08:48If you love our country, you've got to take care of yourselves.
08:52President Trump said that he wants to make America healthy again, but he wants to make
08:57it strong again.
08:59We cannot have a strong country if we have six citizens.
09:03President Trump says that he wants to restore the American dream.
09:08But a person who is healthy has a thousand dreams.
09:14A person who is sick has only one.
09:17And there is 60% of our country now that has only one dream, which is to get better.
09:25And we need to give them a pathway to doing that.
09:28And the pathway is through food.
09:30Food is medicine.
09:32It treats us in different ways.
09:35It treats our health.
09:37It treats our mental health.
09:38There was a recent study that showed that when they switched the diet in prisons, that
09:48violence went down to a whole food diet.
09:52That violence went down by about 70%.
09:55When they switched the diet in juvenile detention centers, the whole food diet, violence went
10:03down 100%.
10:05There's a scientist at Harvard now who is curing schizophrenia with a carnivore diet.
10:15So the loneliness, the dispossession, the crisis that we have in mental health, in suicide,
10:22in ADD, ADHD, all of these are linked, and particularly to the dyes.
10:28It's very clear the dyes that Governor Morrissey is banning.
10:35All of them are linked in very, very strong studies to ADHD and to cancers.
10:44So we're seeing an explosion of cancers in this country.
10:48We're seeing an explosion in infertility.
10:52Teenagers today have 50% of the sperm count and 50% of the testosterone of 68-year-old men.
11:02Girls are now reaching puberty six years earlier than they're supposed to.
11:07Between 10 and 13 years old.
11:10Other countries are not experiencing this.
11:12We've seen autism rates go from 1 in 10,000 when I was a kid, 1 in 10,000, 1 in every
11:2136 kids today, 1 in 22 boys in California.
11:27And the obesity rates have gone up to, as I said, 50% in adults, or 70% overall obesity
11:35or overweight, from 3%.
11:39In Japan, it's still 3%, because they're not eating these foods.
11:45They have nutrition programs in the foods where they have a nutritionist in every school
11:50who's in charge of the menu, and they eat healthy foods.
11:54So they don't have these illnesses.
11:56When I was a kid, we were the healthiest, most robust people in the world.
12:02And today, we're the sickest.
12:0460% of Americans, from 3% when my uncle was president, 60% today have chronic disease.
12:12And it's not happening in other countries.
12:14During COVID, we had 16% of the COVID deaths in this country.
12:21We only have 4.2% of the world's population.
12:25We literally did worse than any country in the world.
12:31And when you ask CDC why are Americans dying from COVID at higher rates than any place
12:36on earth, when we have all the money, they said, well, it's not our fault.
12:41It's because Americans are so sick.
12:44That is their fault.
12:47And we're going to change that.
12:49If they said that, according to CDC, the average American who died from COVID had 3.8 chronic
13:05diseases.
13:06So they had diabetes, they had obesity, and maybe asthma, and one other thing.
13:13And it was the chronic disease, really, that was killing them.
13:16Healthy kids were not dying.
13:18Healthy Americans were not dying of COVID.
13:21It was a disease that attacked the sick, and that's true with all infectious diseases.
13:27If we can make ourselves, the biggest thing that we can do for pandemic preparedness is
13:32to make ourselves healthy again.
13:35We're now, 74% of American kids cannot qualify for military service because of chronic disease.
13:45This is affecting our national security.
13:48It's destroying our economy.
13:50It is existential for this country.
13:54And we need to change it.
13:55And I am so happy that you have a visionary governor in this state, and that West Virginia
14:01is now leading the way.
14:03And I, you know, I want to commend Governor Morrisey, not only for his vision, but for
14:15his courage, because it's very, very hard, and for these legislatures who are pushing
14:20this bill, all of them are getting calls every day from the big soda companies, the sugar
14:27soda and the fake food companies.
14:30We're not eating food, we're eating food like substances.
14:34And I'll tell you what happened in the, I was involved in the tobacco litigation back
14:41in the late 1980s.
14:44And the tobacco companies were at that time the cash richest companies in the world.
14:50But they saw the lighting, the writing on the wall, they saw that the consumer base
14:53was turning against them.
14:55People were stopping smoking, and that they were being prosecuted and sued successfully.
15:02They settled those lawsuits, but they also started shifting their resources to diversify
15:10their companies.
15:12And they went out and they bought the food companies.
15:15So by 1994, the two biggest food companies in the world were RJ Reynolds and Philip Morris,
15:22tobacco companies.
15:24They took about 10,000 scientists who were all engaged in various ways to make tobacco
15:30more addictive, and they put them to work making food addictive, inventing ingredients
15:36in the laboratory that would make it do things to food.
15:41For example, they found out that food that you fill up, you have your brain tells you
15:50your stomach is filled, in part by counting the number of times you chew.
15:56So they started adding softeners to our food so that you wouldn't chew so much.
16:01So you'd have a sense that you're unsatisfied, that you're insatiable, that you're never
16:10full, so that you keep pouring it down your mouth.
16:15That's just one of the many things they did.
16:16They added sodium and sugar.
16:18Sugar is as addictive as crack, and it's almost as bad for you.
16:24It kills you just as surely, it just kills you a little slower.
16:28It feeds tumors, it destroys your body, it destroys your brain.
16:33And they added more and more sugar to make us addicted to their products.
16:38And these companies are now, just like the tobacco companies were, are flooding into
16:44the offices of your state leaders and legislators and the governor.
16:48And they're telling him he's making a big mistake.
16:51They're telling him that they're going to stop writing checks, that they're going to
16:54run people against them, that they're going to destroy their political careers.
16:59And Governor Morrisey was telling me that he met with the soda companies this week,
17:05and they said to him, you need to be educated about this.
17:09And they said, you know, Food Stamps is not a nutrition program.
17:14He came in with his Diet Coke, and he said, is there anything nutritious in here?
17:19And they were like, no, of course not.
17:22But Food Stamps is not a nutrition program.
17:25And he said, it's called SNAP, Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Program.
17:30It's supposed to be nutrition.
17:33It's not supposed to be food-like substances that are actually poisoning us.
17:39But it takes a lot of courage to stand up to these companies the same way that it did
17:44to stand up to big tobacco.
17:46But these men and women, your leaders, Governor Morrisey, is standing up for you.
17:53And we all need to stand up for ourselves and take care of ourselves.
17:58It's an act of patriotism.
18:01If you love this country, you need to start taking care of yourselves.
18:05And I want to thank, I also say this, that food companies all came and met with me two
18:12weeks ago.
18:14And they're scared of me, but they're more scared of Governor Morrisey.
18:21Because what they said, and the reason they said, well, tell us what you want, we're going
18:25to do it.
18:26And they said, but stop these governors from passing these laws.
18:32Because we don't want a patchwork where West Virginia and California are banning food dyes.
18:38And we have to make special products for those states.
18:41So they're terrified of this, of what you're doing.
18:44And what I, the message I want to give to the country today and to all the other governors
18:49is get in line behind Governor Morrisey and apply for a waiver to my agency and we're
18:55going to give it to you.
18:57That's the way we're going to win this.
19:08I want to thank all of you.
19:10I want to thank the Maha Moms who got me into this office.
19:15And President Trump was giving me free reign to do anything I need to do to make America
19:22healthy again.
19:24And I particularly want to thank Governor Morrisey and these
19:34legislators for their courage, for their vision, for their willingness to stand up to the most
19:40powerful industries in the world, to stand up for the people of West Virginia and set
19:46an example, a shining example of the rest of the country.
19:50Thank you all very much.