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    Amid Tension Around H.H.S. Cuts, Kennedy Meets With Tribal Leader

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    At the very moment that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was set to take the stage, the governor of Gila River Indian Community was still standing at the podium, articulating his uneasiness around recent Trump administration moves.“Let me repeat that: We have spent a good part of this year providing education on why tribes have a political status that is not D.E.I.,” Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis said to a room of 1,200 people, who clapped and cheered.When it comes to cuts sought by what has been called the Department of Government Efficiency, “we need a scalpel and not a chain saw approach to making these changes,” he said. The Gila River Wild Horse Pass Resort and Casino in Chandler, Ariz., owned and operated by two tribes, was the latest stop on Mr. Kennedy’s Make American Healthy Again tour through three Southwestern states. Mr. Kennedy was set to host a “fireside chat” at the Tribal Self-Governance Conference, an event celebrating 50 years of tribal sovereignty under the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act.The act, passed by Congress in 1975, marked a shift away from federal government control, so that Native communities could run their own programs based on their unique cultural needs.Mr. Kennedy has long expressed a particular zeal for improving tribal health, citing his family’s long history of advocacy, his childhood trips to American Indian reservations, and parts of his own environmental career.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Nutritionist Marion Nestle Meets Her Moment, At 88

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      On a dreary February afternoon in Westchester County, N.Y., the cooks, farmers, servers and other staff of the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture convened over a roast beef dinner to hear Marion Nestle hold forth on the state of food politics.Dr. Nestle, one of the country’s foremost experts on nutrition policy, was still trying to get her head around the political realignments of the prior months. After his win in November, Donald J. Trump selected Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run his federal health department. The partnership produced a new take on an old slogan, “Make America Healthy Again.” It also led the McDonald’s-loving Mr. Trump to publicly criticize the “industrial food complex.”The phrasing stood out to Dr. Nestle, a molecular biologist turned nutritionist who has spent decades pushing for stricter regulation of food additives and removing conflicts of interest from government health policy.“He sounds just like me when he talks!” Dr. Nestle, who describes herself as “firmly left-wing,” told the crowd, eliciting laughter. “How is that possible?”Dr. Nestle (pronounced NESS-ul) is not a name on the level of the chef Alice Waters or the food writer Michael Pollan. But among food activists and academics, she is considered one of the most influential framers of the modern food movement. She was among the first, in 2002, to lay the blame for America’s obesity epidemic at the feet of the food industry when she released “Food Politics,” a book of case studies illustrating how the industry manipulates government policy and the scientific establishment to its own ends.Dr. Nestle was 65 when the book came out, and she could have stopped then. Instead, she has been on a run ever since, publishing a dozen more books, globe-trotting to deliver speeches and serving as a go-to source for journalists. But only now, at 88, does she seem to be reaching her peak. For years, Dr. Nestle’s ideas placed her in food policy’s progressive camp. But today, fears about food additives and environmental toxins are rampant, and some of her longest held and most passionate beliefs — about topics like regenerative agriculture, school lunches and additives — are marching toward the bipartisan center.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      RFK Jr. to Kick Off MAHA Tour on Fighting Chronic Disease

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      After a second measles death in West Texas, the health secretary is expected to begin a tour through the Southwest to showcase nutrition legislation, among other priorities.A day after attending the funeral of an unvaccinated child who died of measles, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will kick off a tour through Southwestern states on Monday, spotlighting initiatives that emphasize nutrition and lifestyle choices as tools for combating disease.The Make America Healthy Again tour, which will take Mr. Kennedy through parts of Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, is intended to draw attention to some of the secretary’s common-ground interests, but the first day is scheduled to end with a highly contentious one: a news conference to highlight Utah’s new law that bans adding fluoride to public drinking water supplies.The tour comes as questions grow about the federal government’s response to a measles outbreak in West Texas that has spread to other states. The death of an unvaccinated 8-year-old girl there last week was the second confirmed fatality from measles in a decade in the United States. Mr. Kennedy attended the girl’s funeral on Sunday and met with her family before continuing to Utah.Mr. Kennedy’s staff said that over the course of three days, he planned to visit multiple health centers, including a medical school’s “teaching kitchen” to train students on managing chronic disease using dietary choices. He is scheduled to meet with leaders of Navajo Nation to discuss the cultural and logistical challenges of providing high-quality health care to tribal groups and to visit a charter school in New Mexico that “integrates healthy eating and physical fitness into its daily student life.”During his first months in office, Mr. Kennedy’s policies have been unfurled with great brouhaha, but the secretary himself has been relatively low profile, particularly for an official with his degree of fame. The White House has encouraged Mr. Kennedy to take a more public-facing approach to his role, but the timing of his first major push out in the country will require toeing a careful line around the most conspicuous issue on the table.Public health experts say the measles outbreak that has now infected nearly 500 people in West Texas is driven by low vaccination rates. Mr. Kennedy, who is famously skeptical of vaccine safety, shifted his rhetoric after the little girl’s funeral, posting on X: “The most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      States Will Be Able to Bar Federal Food Benefit Recipients From Buying Soft Drinks, Kennedy Says

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      Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced on Friday that the Trump administration will begin allowing states to bar recipients of federal food assistance from using the money to pay for soft drinks — a core component of his “Make America Healthy Again” agenda.Mr. Kennedy announced the change to the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, in Martinsburg, W.Va., where he appeared with Gov. Patrick Morrissey, who recently signed legislation banning foods containing most artificial food dyes and two preservatives — the first state to do so.The health secretary is talking to 15 other governors about similar moves, according to Calley Means, a health food entrepreneur who recently joined the White House to help carry out Mr. Kennedy’s agenda. Mr. Kennedy told the audience in West Virginia that the food companies had used science to make their products addictive, just as tobacco firms had.“Food is medicine,” Mr. Kennedy told a group of teachers, children and parents in the gymnasium of a local school. He added: “It treats our health. It treats our mental health.”Mr. Kennedy’s appearance, with a Republican governor, speaks to a pronounced cultural change in the politics of food and health, as Republicans join the health secretary’s “make America healthy again” movement. But in a decidedly Republican twist, Mr. Morrissey also announced new “work, training and educational requirements” for SNAP participants.The governor also announced a new statewide exercise initiative, and said he intended to “start shedding a few pounds” himself.Mr. Morrisey announced he would seek the required waiver to bar soft drink purchases using SNAP, along with other initiatives intended to promote exercise and to encourage West Virginians to become healthier. The state has one of the highest obesity rates in the nation. He introduced Mr. Kennedy as one of “the most talked about, vilified men in America” and “a warrior for children.”Mr. Kennedy does not have authority over the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which falls under the Agriculture Department. But Mr. Means said that the agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, has agreed to grant the waivers. More

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      Joan Dye Gussow, Pioneer of Eating Locally, Is Dead at 96

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      An indefatigable gardener, she was concerned, a colleague said, with “all the things that have to happen for us to get our food.”Joan Dye Gussow, a nutritionist and educator who was often referred to as the matriarch of the “eat locally, think globally” food movement, died on Friday at her home in Piermont, N.Y., in Rockland County. She was 96.Her death, from congestive heart failure, was announced by Pamela A. Koch, an associate professor of nutrition education at Teachers College, Columbia University, where Ms. Gussow, a professor emeritus, had taught for more than half a century.Ms. Gussow was one of the first in her field to emphasize the connections between farming practices and consumers’ health. Her book “The Feeding Web: Issues in Nutritional Ecology” (1978) influenced the thinking of writers including Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver.“Nutrition is thought of as the science of what happens to food once it gets in our bodies — as Joan put it, ‘What happens after the swallow,’” Ms. Koch said in an interview.But Ms. Gussow beamed her gimlet-eyed attention on what happens before the swallow. “Her concern was with all the things that have to happen for us to get our food,” Ms. Koch said. “She was about seeing the big picture of food issues and sustainability.”Ms. Gussow, an indefatigable gardener and a tub-thumper for community gardens, began deploying the phrase “local food” after reviewing the statistics on the declining number of farmers in the United States. (Farm and ranch families made up less than 5 percent of the population in 1970 and less than 2 percent of the population in 2023.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Every 100 Years America Produces a Robert Kennedy Jr.

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      The wrestling champion Bernarr Macfadden loved raw milk and cold plunges. He hated vaccines and despised white flour, which he called “dead food.” His greatest enemy after white flour was the American Medical Association. He thought that the sedentary weakness of the American people was a crime and that overeating was wicked, writing, “Hardly a home exists that is not made unhappy, to a greater or less extent, by this habit,” in a book called “Strength From Eating.”“Strength From Eating” features a photograph of the muscleman flexing his veiny, highly articulated arm right before the preface, with the phrase “yours for health,” written in Macfadden’s distinctive cursive underneath the photo. Mr. Macfadden was a genius of self-promotion — he understood that flooding the zone with his ideas and his own scantily clad body via tabloids, magazines and radio was key to spreading his gospel.A fit body like his own, his thinking went, was a moral body. A person could ward off all manner of deadly diseases without medical intervention as long as they took care of their individual health. According to a biography of Mr. Macfadden called “Mr. America” by Mark Adams, “Vaccination, or as Mr. Macfadden saw it, the unnecessary pumping of dead germs into the bloodstream, was lunacy.”Mr. Macfadden’s ideas are served to millions of people every day via social media health influencers in the year 2025, but he is not of the internet era. He was born in 1868, and he was arguably the most prominent proponent of alternative health practices from around 1900 until after World War II. He found common ground with politicians like Franklin Roosevelt and Hollywood celebrities like Rudolph Valentino. It is impossible to read about Mr. Macfadden — who was using the term “medical freedom” in 1920 — without thinking about Robert F. Kennedy Jr., our new secretary of health and human services, and the raw-milk-drinking, vaccine-skeptical, psychedelic-loving Make America Healthy Again movement that has coalesced around him.On the first day of his confirmation hearings, Mr. Kennedy described battling the ill health of our nation’s children in much the same way Mr. Macfadden did, as a moral crusade: “It is a spiritual issue and it is a moral issue. We cannot live up to our role as an exemplary nation, as a moral authority around the world, and we’re writing off an entire generation of kids.”For a long time, I thought the MAHA movement was simply anti-institutional. But that explanation falls apart upon examination, because the medical establishment has long argued for clean air, clean water and better access to healthy food. I have never met a doctor who doesn’t stress regular exercise. Many people have pointed out that Michelle Obama was concerned about childhood obesity just as Mr. Kennedy is and used her platform to encourage Americans to eat healthily and move their bodies.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Yelloh, Formerly Schwan’s Home Delivery, Closes

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      Yelloh, the frozen food delivery service formerly called Schwan’s Home Delivery, which had once been known for its reach with rural Americans and its direct-to-consumer business model, is closing its doors on Friday after decades of decline.Minnesota-based Yelloh was born on March 18, 1952 when its founder, Marvin Schwan, delivered 14 gallons of ice cream. The service’s popularity exploded over the years and later foods frozen at their peak made it onto the menu. At its peak, the company delivered meals and ice cream across 48 states, but critics and experts said the company became frozen in time, ceding ground to competitors and modernity.The Schwan’s name lives on in frozen foods (Red Baron, Freschetta, and Mrs. Smith’s are among their many brands) — that side of the business was sold to CJ CheilJedan, a South Korean company, in 2019. But on Nov. 8, Yelloh permanently parked its fleet of refrigerated trucks that, with their yellow décor, were once instantly recognizable in small towns across America. Friday’s closure means that about 1,100 people across 13 states will be out of a job.In a statement, the company said it made its decision because of “multiple insurmountable business challenges,” including “economic and market forces, as well as changing consumer lifestyles.”Michael Ziebell, a Yelloh board member who spent 22 years with the company and previously held leadership roles, said the shuttering was devastating, calling it a very hard and very emotional decision.But, he said, it was not sudden.In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Ziebell said demographic and market issues began plaguing the company in the late 1980s and early ’90s; with fewer people home as drivers came, the relationships between drivers and customers that had been built over decades began to diminish. Then came membership stores like Costco, which could compete on frozen food price and quality, and on top of that regulatory changes added restrictions to their truck operations. It was “the perfect storm,” he said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Kennedy’s Views Mix Mistrust of Business With Bizarre Health Claims

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      Seven years after Americans celebrated the licensing of Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine, President John F. Kennedy called on Congress to finance a nationwide vaccination program to stamp out what he called the “ancient enemies of our children”: infectious disease.Now Kennedy’s nephew, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is the nation’s chief critic of vaccines — a public health intervention that has saved millions of lives — and President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick to become the next secretary of health and human services. Mr. Kennedy calls himself a vaccine safety activist. The press calls him a vaccine skeptic. His detractors call him an anti-vaxxer and a conspiracy theorist.Whatever one calls him, Mr. Kennedy is a polarizing choice whose views on certain public health matters beyond vaccination are far outside the mainstream. He opposes fluoride in water. He favors raw milk, which the Food and Drug Administration deems risky. And he has promoted unproven therapies like hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19. His own relatives called his presidential bid “dangerous for our country.”If there is a through line to Mr. Kennedy’s thinking, it appears to be a deep mistrust of corporate influence on health and medicine. In some cases, that has led him to support positions that are also embraced by public health professionals, including his push to get ultra-processed foods, which have been linked to obesity, off grocery store shelves. His disdain for profit-seeking pharmaceutical manufacturers and food companies drew applause on the campaign trail.People close to him say his commitment to “make America healthy again” is heartfelt.“This is his life’s mission,” said Brian Festa, a founder of We the Patriots U.S.A., a “medical freedom” group that has pushed back on vaccine mandates, who said he has known Mr. Kennedy for years.But like Mr. Trump, Mr. Kennedy also has a tendency to float wild theories based on scanty evidence. And he has hinted at taking actions, like prosecuting leading medical journals, that have unnerved the medical community. On Friday, many leading public health experts reacted to his nomination with alarm.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Time to Say Goodbye to the B.M.I.?

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      The body mass index has long been criticized as a flawed indicator of health. A replacement has been gaining support: the body roundness index.Move over, body mass index. Make room for roundness — to be precise, the body roundness index.The body mass index, or B.M.I., is a ratio of height to weight that has long been used as a medical screening tool. It is one of the most widely used health metrics but also one of the most reviled, because it is used to label people overweight, obese or extremely obese.The classifications have been questioned by athletes like the American Olympic rugby player Ilona Maher, whose B.M.I. of 30 technically puts her on the cusp of obesity. “But alas,” she said on Instagram, addressing online trolls who tried to shame her about her weight, “I’m going to the Olympics and you’re not.”Advocates for overweight individuals and people of color note that the formula was developed nearly 200 years ago and based exclusively on data from men, most of them white, and that it was never intended for medical screening. Even physicians have weighed in on the shortcomings of B.M.I. The American Medical Association warned last year that B.M.I. is an imperfect metric that doesn’t account for racial, ethnic, age, sex and gender diversity. It can’t differentiate between individuals who carry a lot of muscle and those with fat in all the wrong places.“Based on B.M.I., Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was a bodybuilder would have been categorized as obese and needing to lose weight,” said Dr. Wajahat Mehal, director of the Metabolic Health and Weight Loss Program at Yale University.“But as soon as you measured his waist, you’d see, ‘Oh, it’s 32 inches.’”So welcome a new metric: the body roundness index. B.R.I. is just what it sounds like — a measure of how round or circlelike you are, using a formula that takes into account height and waist, but not weight.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More