Articles: Health Care

It’s time for President Biden to create a National Institute for Food, Nutrition and Disease Prevention within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and make it the central scientific voice on nutrition within the government. That one step could lower American health care costs by hundreds of billions of dollars per year, improve health care, enhance social justice and prepare Americans to survive the next pandemic.

America may be “exceptional,” but Americans are often fools. That is especially true when you feed them scraps of wildly wrong and useless data. Suddenly everyone is an instant expert on climate change, education or health care.

I cannot count the number of dinner parties I’ve disrupted by asking “committed environmentalists” a simple question: “Have you even read the IPCC reports?” Those are the U.N. Climate Change reports, often referred to as the “settled science.” They do not say the world will end in 10 years, 100 years or 1,000 years, and do not provide a compelling argument for the immediate destruction of the world economy, with endless misery for the poor, to achieve “zero emissions.” Ditto Stanford’s CREDO studies, which strongly support charter schools for the poor. Ditto the National Health Insurance Experiment, which suggests “Medicare for All” might lead to Medicare for None.

But the most egregious recent example of Americans swallowing scraps of nonsense data is COVID-19 “cases data.” Suddenly, everyone in the neighborhood is an epidemiologist with religious fervor. But, self-righteous though they may be, they are largely wrong.

No one likes private equity; just ask Mitt Romney, the Utah senator who made his fortune at Bain Capital in the 1980s and ’90s. But private equity does change the world, sometimes for the better. Private equity firms buy distressed and undervalued companies, reorganize their systems and processes, restructure their finances, lay off redundant workers, bring in new and more efficient technologies, leverage them to the hilt, and then, exit — sort of like what the novel coronavirus is doing to America.

Many in Washington are shouting “follow the science.” With the novel coronavirus, while there is significant confusion over effective medical treatments to prevent or cure COVID-19, one key piece of scientific evidence is beyond dispute: Those at the highest risk of extreme illness and death have underlying conditions such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease or high blood pressure. In some studies, up to 97 percent of people dying of COVID-19 have these conditions.

In his State of the Union message, President Trump focused on giving all American schoolchildren the chance to succeed. Unfortunately, Sonny Perdue, his secretary of Agriculture, is doing just the opposite. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) proposed “School Meals Flexibilities” rule for school menus is a disaster for millions of children. It is a full retreat from science-based health and nutrition principles, is severely misaligned with today’s research, and could be considered a human rights violation of young Americans.

The National Football League’s Super Bowl will be played on Feb. 2 and the Iowa Caucuses kick off the national Political Super Bowl on Feb. 3. Both will make you sick.

During the college football bowl season, giving way to the professional football Super Bowl, American companies will spend more than $2 billion in television ads … to eventually add an estimated $200 billion to America’s annual national health care costs.

A new study by the prestigious National Academy of Sciences may expose “Medicare for All” as the fraud it is.

With the explosion of lifestyle-related medical conditions including obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer, some in the medical community are shifting their focus to evidence-based prevention and care, with recommendations for diet, exercise, supplements, detoxification, and stress management. Within this new paradigm, using food as medicine has become central to effective medical treatment.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, and other liberal candidates for office this year are calling for “single-payer” health care, or “Medicare for all.” These proposals would be inefficient and explosively expensive, leading to a collapse of the U.S. health care system and the emergence of a two-tiered system with excellent, expensive health care for the rich and little or no health care for the poor and elderly.