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A year after the Trump administration laid out its plan to improve the health of American children, we examine where those efforts stand.
Credit...Ricardo Santos
The reporters cover the “Make America Healthy Again” movement and how Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s policies could affect Americans’ health.
Last September, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. released the government’s ambitious plan to improve the health of American children, promising reforms that he said would have been “unthinkable two years ago” and pledging to carry them out “very, very quickly.”
The highly publicized “Make Our Children Healthy Again” report laid out more than 100 goals, some that medical experts praised as worthwhile and many others that they dismissed as unscientific, potentially harmful or unlikely to improve children’s health.
The New York Times assessed the progress on the central promises in the four areas the report outlined — “poor diet,” “chemical exposure,” “lack of physical activity and chronic stress” and “overmedicalization” — and documented actions from the administration that have contradicted some of those goals.
In a statement, Grace Davis Jamison, a health department spokeswoman, wrote that Mr. Kennedy and President Trump have “delivered historic reforms that are fundamentally changing how the federal government approaches food, nutrition and chronic disease,” adding that the administration’s “record speaks for itself.”
REPORT PRIORITY NO. 1
‘Poor Diet’
The report proposed initiatives to improve children’s diets, including tightening oversight of chemicals in foods, developing a federal definition for ultraprocessed foods and restricting the marketing of unhealthy foods.
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