Health

RFK Jr.’s MAHA Movement Obscures America’s Unhealthy Past

Published

1 year ago

January 13, 2025

RFK Jr.’s MAHA Movement Obscures America’s Unhealthy Past

“We will make Americans healthy again,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has declared. A political action committee that has promoted Mr. Kennedy, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick for health and human services secretary, says his movement is “igniting a health revolution in America.”

But the word “again” presumes a time in the country’s past when Americans were in better health. Was there ever really a time when America was healthier?

For historians of medicine, there is a short answer.

“No,” said Nancy Tomes, a historian at Stony Brook University.

John Harley Warner, a historian at Yale, said, “It’s hard for me to think of a time when America, with all the real health disparities that characterize our system, was healthier.”

Dr. Jeremy Greene, a historian at Johns Hopkins University, asked: “Which particular era does R.F.K. want to take us back to?”

Probably not the 19th and early 20th century.

Rich men smoked cigarettes and cigars, the poor chewed tobacco. Heavy drinking was the norm.

“It was definitely a drinking culture,” said Dora Costa, an economic historian at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Drinking was a huge problem, saloons were a huge concern. Men were drinking away their paychecks. That is the reason we had Prohibition.”

And, Dr. Costa notes, American diets for most of the 19th century were monotonous.

It’s true that agriculture at the time was organic, food was locally produced and there were no ultraprocessed foods. But fresh fruits and vegetables were in short supply because they were difficult to ship and because growing seasons were so short. For the most part, Dr. Costa said, until the 1930s, “Americans were living off of dried fruits and vegetables.”

As for protein, Americans were relying on salted pork, she said, because meat was difficult to preserve. Only after the Civil War did meatpackers in Chicago begin to process meat and ship fresh beef across the country. At that point, Dr. Costa said, beef “became a large part of the American diet.”

But even though the availability of beef helped diversify diets, people did not become healthier.

Dr. Costa worked with Robert Fogel, the University of Chicago economic historian and Nobel laureate, to understand the health of a population of Americans living in the North around this period by examining the medical records of Union Army soldiers. Common conditions, like hernias, were untreatable — men had hernias as big as grapefruits, held in by trusses. Nineteen percent of those soldiers had heart valve problems by the time they were 60, compared with about 8.5 percent today.

Poor nutrition led to poor health. People were thin, often too thin. In 1900, 6.1 percent of Union Army veterans were underweight — a risk factor for various illnesses and often a marker of ill health — compared with 1.6 percent of U.S. adults today. In 1850, males at age 20 could expect to live to around 61 years. Today it is 74 years.

The start of the 20th century saw public health improvements (cleaner water, for example, and posters advising parents not to give their babies beer), but disease was rampant. There were no antibiotics and very few vaccines. When the 1918 flu struck the nation, no one knew the cause — the flu virus had not been discovered and strange folk remedies were rampant. About 675,000 Americans died. In 1929, the Great Depression began, and its economic toll over the next decade led to severe nutritional and health problems.

Health improved in the second half of the 20th century but was poor compared with that today.

Many people are nostalgic for the 1950s and 1960s, seeing those decades as a time of prosperity, when the American pharmaceutical industry pumped out new medical advances: antibiotics, antipsychotics, drugs for high blood pressure and vaccines for tetanus, diphtheria, measles and polio.

Despite that progress, those years were terrible for health, Dr. Greene said, with “a tremendous amount of heart attacks and strokes.”

Heart disease was rampant in 1950, with 322 deaths per 100,000 Americans annually from cardiovascular disease, double the rate today. By 1960, Dr. Greene said, heart disease, was responsible for one-third of all deaths in America.

In part, that was because nearly everyone smoked.

“We were among the heaviest smoking countries,” said Samuel Preston, an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. David F. Musto, a medical historian at Yale, who died in 2010, once said in an interview that although he never enjoyed smoking, the social pressure to smoke when he was in college in the 1950s was so great that “I felt it was my duty to find my brand.”

Smoking greatly increases the risk for heart disease, the leading killer in the 1950s and 1960s.

Heart disease death rates plummeted in recent decades because smoking is much less common now, and treatment for heart disease is much more effective. Cholesterol-lowering statins, introduced in 1987, reduced the risk of heart disease. Other new medications as well as bypass surgery and stents also saved lives.

Cancer was the second leading killer in the 1950s, as it is today. But in 1950, there were 194 cancer deaths per 100,000 people. Now there are 142 cancer deaths per 100,000 people.

A decline in smoking is a leading reason, but there also has been a revolution in cancer treatment.

Until the 1990s, cancer was treated with brute force: surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. Now an array of targeted therapies are turning some cancers, once deadly, into treatable chronic diseases or even curing them.

Dr. Greene said he was not surprised by the idea of a halcyon past when people were healthier.

“There’s a long history in America of nostalgia for a past that was better than the present,” he said. “History is all about erasure — the things we don’t choose to remember.”

Today is not a sort of health utopia, of course.

Researchers are quick to acknowledge that Americans’ health is not as good as it can be. And they bemoan the huge disparities in health care in this country.

Yet the U.S. spends more on medical care than other countries — an average of $12,555 per capita, which is about twice what other wealthy countries spend.

But, historians say, the past was actually much worse.

And so, they say, the phrase “Make America Healthy Again” makes no sense.

“As a historian of health, I don’t know what ‘again’ Kennedy is imagining,” Dr. Tomes said. “The idea that once upon a time all Americans were healthy is a fantasy.”

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Health

Heart disease threat projected to climb sharply for key demographic

Published

3 hours ago

February 27, 2026

Press Room

Heart disease threat projected to climb sharply for key demographic

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A new report by the American Heart Association (AHA) included some troubling predictions for the future of women’s health.

The forecast, published in the journal Circulation on Wednesday, projected increases in various comorbidities in American females by 2050.

More than 59% of women were predicted to have high blood pressure, up from less than 49% currently.

The review also projected that more than 25% of women will have diabetes, compared to about 15% today, and more than 61% will have obesity, compared to 44% currently.

As a result of these risk factors, the prevalence of cardiovascular disease and stroke is expected to rise to 14.4% from 10.7%.

The prevalence of cardiovascular disease and stroke in women is expected to rise to 14.4% from 10.7% by 2050. (iStock)

Not all trends were negative, as unhealthy cholesterol prevalence is expected to drop to about 22% from more than 42% today, the report stated.

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Dr. Elizabeth Klodas, a cardiologist and founder of Step One Foods in Minnesota, commented on these “jarring findings.”

“The fact that on our current trajectory, cardiometabolic disease is projected to explode in women within one generation should be a huge wake-up call,” she told Fox News Digital.

NEARLY 90% OF AMERICANS AT RISK OF SILENT DISEASE — HERE’S WHAT TO KNOW

“Hypertension, diabetes, obesity — these are all major risk factors for heart disease, and we are already seeing what those risks are driving. Heart disease is the No. 1 killer of women, eclipsing all other causes of death, including breast cancer.”

Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death for women in the U.S. and around the world. (iStock)

Klodas warned that heart disease starts early, progresses “stealthily,” and can present “out of the blue in devastating ways.”

The AHA published another study on Thursday revealing one million hospitalizations, showing that heart attack deaths are climbing among adults below the age of 55.

The more alarming finding, according to Klodas, is that young women were found more likely to die after their first heart attack than men of the same age.

DOCTOR SHARES 3 SIMPLE CHANGES TO STAY HEALTHY AND INDEPENDENT AS YOU AGE

“This is all especially tragic since heart disease is almost entirely preventable,” she said. “The earlier you start, the better.”

Children can show early evidence of plaque deposition in their arteries, which can be reversed through lifestyle changes if “undertaken early enough and aggressively enough,” according to the expert.

Moving more is one part of protecting a healthy heart, according to experts. (iStock)

Klodas suggested that rising heart conditions are associated with traditional risk factors, like smoking, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, obesity and a sedentary lifestyle.

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Doctors are also seeing higher rates of preeclampsia, or high blood pressure during pregnancy, as well as gestational diabetes. Klodas noted that these are sex-specific risk factors that don’t typically contribute to complications until after menopause.

The best way to protect a healthy heart is to “do the basics,” Klodas recommended, including the following lifestyle habits.

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Klodas especially emphasized making improvements to diet, as the food people eat affects “every single risk factor that the AHA’s report highlights.”

“High blood pressure, high blood sugar, high cholesterol, excess weight – these are all conditions that are driven in part or in whole by food,” she said. “We eat multiple times every single day, which means what we eat has profound cumulative effects over time.”

“Even a small improvement in dietary intake, when maintained, can have a massive positive impact on health,” a doctor said. (iStock)

“Even a small improvement in dietary intake, when maintained, can have a massive positive impact on health.”

The doctor also recommends changing out a few snacks per day for healthier choices, which has been proven to “yield medication-level cholesterol reductions” in a month.

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“Keep up that small change and, over the course of a year, you could also lose 20 pounds and reduce your sodium intake enough to avoid blood pressure-lowering medications,” Klodas added.

“Women should not view the AHA report as inevitable. We have power over our health destinies. We just need to use it.”

Angelica Stabile is a lifestyle reporter for Fox News Digital.

Health

Vanessa Williams, 62, Opens up About Weight Loss and HRT After Menopause

Published

15 hours ago

February 26, 2026

Press Room

Vanessa Williams, 62, Opens up About Weight Loss and HRT After Menopause

Vanessa Williams Opens up About Weight Loss and HRT | Woman’s World

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Health

Common vision issue linked to type of lighting used in Americans’ homes

Published

15 hours ago

February 26, 2026

Press Room

Common vision issue linked to type of lighting used in Americans’ homes

NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!

Nearsightedness (myopia) is skyrocketing globally, with nearly half of the world’s population expected to be myopic by 2050, according to the World Health Organization.

Heavy use of smartphones and other devices is associated with an 80% higher risk of myopia when combined with excessive computer use, but a new study suggests that dim indoor lighting could also be a factor.

For years, scientists have been puzzled by the different ways myopia is triggered. In lab settings, it can be induced by blurring vision or using different lenses. Conversely, it can be slowed by something as simple as spending time outdoors, research suggests.

Nearsightedness occurs when the eyeball grows too long from front to back, according to the American Optometric Association (AOA). This physical elongation causes light to focus in front of the retina rather than directly on it, making distant objects appear blurry.

The study suggests that myopia isn’t caused by the digital devices themselves, but by the low-light environments where they are typically used. (iStock)

Researchers at the State University of New York (SUNY) College of Optometry identified a potential specific trigger for this growth. When someone looks at a phone or a book up close, the pupil naturally constricts.

COMMON VISION ISSUE COULD LEAD TO MISSED CANCER WARNING, STUDY FINDS

“In bright outdoor light, the pupil constricts to protect the eye while still allowing ample light to reach the retina,” Urusha Maharjan, a SUNY Optometry doctoral student who conducted the study, said in a press release.

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“When people focus on close objects indoors, such as phones, tablets or books, the pupil can also constrict — not because of brightness, but to sharpen the image,” she went on. “In dim lighting, this combination may significantly reduce retinal illumination.”

High-intensity natural light prevents myopia because it provides enough retinal stimulation to override the “stop growing” signal, even when pupils are constricted. (iStock)

The hypothesis suggests that when the retina is deprived of light during extended close-up work, it sends a signal for the eye to grow.

In a dim environment, the narrowed pupil allows so little light through that the retinal activity isn’t strong enough to signal the eye to stop growing, the researchers found.

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In contrast, being outdoors provides light levels much brighter than indoors. This ensures that even when the pupil narrows to focus on a nearby object, the retina still receives a strong signal, maintaining healthy eye development.

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The team noted some limitations of the study, including the small subject group and the inability to directly measure internal lens changes, as the bright backgrounds used to mimic the outdoors made pupils too small for standard equipment.

Researchers believe that increasing indoor brightness during close-up work could be a simple, testable way to slow the global nearsightedness epidemic. (iStock)

“This is not a final answer,” Jose-Manuel Alonso, MD, PhD, SUNY distinguished professor and senior author of the study, said in the release.

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“But the study offers a testable hypothesis that reframes how visual habits, lighting and eye focusing interact.”

The study was published in the journal Cell Reports.

Khloe Quill is a lifestyle production assistant with Fox News Digital. She and the lifestyle team cover a range of story topics including food and drink, travel, and health.