MAHA RFK Jr. Movement it obscures America’s unhealthy past

“We will make Americans well again.” declared Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The political action committee that promoted Kennedy, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick to be secretary of Health and Human Services, says his move is “igniting a health revolution in America.”

However, the word “again” assumes a period in the country’s past when Americans were in better health. Was there really a time when America was healthier?

For historians of medicine, the answer is low.

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

John Harley Warner, a historian at Yale, said: “I have a tough time remembering 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, “What specific era is RFK trying to take us back to?”

Probably not from the 19th or early 20th century.

Prosperous men smoked cigarettes and cigars, impoverished men chewed tobacco. Bulky 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, lounges were a huge problem. Men drank away their paychecks. This is the reason we introduced prohibition.”

Moreover, as Dr. Costa notes, the American diet was monotonous for much of the 19th century.

It is true that in those days agriculture was organic, food was produced locally and there were no ultra-processed foods. However, fresh fruit and vegetables were in low supply because they were arduous to transport and the growing seasons were so low. Dr. Costa stated that until the 1930s, “Americans lived on dried fruits and vegetables.”

For protein, Americans rely on salt pork, she said, because the meat is arduous to preserve. It wasn’t until after the Civil War that meat packers in Chicago began processing meat and shipping fresh beef across the country. At that point, Dr. Costa said, beef “had become a large part of the American diet.”

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

Dr. Costa worked with Robert Fogel, an economic historian at the University of Chicago and Nobel Prize winner, to understand the health of the population of Americans living in the North during this period by checking medical records Union Army soldiers. Common conditions such as hernias were incurable – men had hernias the size of grapefruits, held in place by trusses. By comparison, nineteen percent of these soldiers had heart valve problems before the age of 60 from about 8.5 percent today.

Indigent nutrition has led to impoverished health. People were skinny, often too skinny. In 1900 6.1 percent Union Army veterans were underweight – a risk factor for various diseases and often an indicator of impoverished health with 1.6 percent American adults today. In 1850 men in their 20s he could expect to live to about 61 years of age. Today it is so 74 years old.

In the early 20th century, public health improved (for example, cleaner water and posters advising parents not to give their children beer), but disease was rampant. There were no antibiotics and very few vaccines. When the flu hit the nation in 1918, 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, the economic effects of which led to stern nutritional and health problems over the next decade.

Health improved in the second half of the 20th century, but was impoverished compared to today.

Many people miss the 1950s and 1960s, seeing those decades as a time of prosperity when the American pharmaceutical industry launched novel medical progress: antibiotics, antipsychotic drugs, medicines for high blood pressure AND vaccinations for tetanus, diphtheria, measles and polio.

Despite this progress, these years were terrible for health, Dr. Greene said, with “a huge number of heart attacks and strokes.”

In 1950, heart disease was rampant, with 322 deaths per 100,000 Americans per year for cardiovascular diseases, currently twice as much. Until 1960, Dr. Greene said, the cause was heart disease one third of all deaths in America.

This was partly because almost everyone smoked.

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

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

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

Deaths from heart disease have dropped dramatically in recent decades because smoking is now much less common and heart disease treatments are much more effective. cholesterol-lowering statins, introduced in 1987reduces the risk of heart disease. Other novel drugs, as well as bypass surgery and stents, have also saved lives.

In the 1950s, as today, cancer was the second leading killer. But in 1950 there were 194 cancer deaths per 100,000 people. Currently, 142 people die from cancer per 100,000 people.

The main reason is the decline in smoking, but there has also been a revolution in the treatment of cancer.

Until the 1990s, cancer was treated with brute force: surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy. Currently, a number of targeted therapies are turning some once-fatal cancers into treatable, or even curable, chronic diseases.

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

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

Nowadays, of course, are not a health utopia.

Scientists are quick to admit that Americans’ health is not as good as it could be. And they deplore the huge disparities in health care in this country.

However, the United States spends more on health care than other countries – on average $12,555 per capitawhich is about twice as much as other wealthy countries spend.

But historians say the past was actually much worse.

That’s why, they say, the phrase “Make America Well Again” makes no sense.

“As a health historian, I don’t know what Kennedy is imagining ‘again,’” Dr. Tomes said. “The idea that everything will happen someday Americans were well, it’s a fantasy.”