Even when Kennedy is right, he's totally wrong

The publication last week of a new and innovative report on the causes of colorectal cancer could not be more timely, coming as it does when Americans are debating whether what we eat is killing us prematurely -- and whether Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s "Make America Healthy Again" slogan should qualify him to serve as secretary of Health and Human Services, with control over the government's critical scientific and medical research.

At first glance that study -- published Dec. 10 by a team of doctors and scientists affiliated with the University of South Florida and the Tampa General Hospital Cancer Institute -- appeared to confirm Kennedy's charge that seed oils such as those derived from corn, canola (rapeseed) and sunflowers are causing an epidemic of chronic illness, from heart disease and cancer to obesity. Its findings showed excessive amounts of those oils in tumor samples from dozens of patients -- and indicated that gut inflammation by those substances encouraged colon cancer, now the second-highest cause of cancer deaths and a rapidly increasing disease among younger people under 50.

"We don't know the full effects of these ultraprocessed foods on our body, but we do know that that's a major thing that's changed from 1950 onward," said Dr. Timothy Yeatman, one of the study's lead authors, speaking to Scientific American. "Young people today, particularly rural and impoverished people, are being exposed to more of these processed foods than anybody else because they're cheap and they're in all the fast-food restaurants."

Yet if this suggests that Kennedy is right about the dangers of ultraprocessed foods, the arrival of the colon cancer study also proved that he is absolutely wrong about the agencies that he will oversee if confirmed by the U.S. Senate. His standard indictment of the National Institutes of Health, for instance, is that its staff and its output have been "captured" by the food industry; it must be razed to the ground before it can be reformed.

Shooting from the hip as usual, Kennedy has warned that his reorganization of the medical science agencies will be not just swift but instantaneous, with no time wasted actually learning about them and their personnel. "We need to act fast," he said recently. "So that on Jan. 21, 600 people are going to walk into offices at NIH and 600 people are going to leave."

That would be too bad, because the University of South Florida team delving into the perils of highly processed seed oil products has been funded by a five-year, $3 million NIH grant -- likely approved by the same people Kennedy is now threatening. Going "wild," as President-elect Donald Trump promised he would let Kennedy do, will throw the agency into chaos and probably curtail the kind of valuable research these scientists sponsor.

How ironic that a study supporting one of Kennedy's ideas is being supported by an agency he is seeking to disrupt and perhaps destroy. He has also floated the idea of a "moratorium" on NIH research into infectious diseases, as if we need no longer worry about the flu, meningitis, coronavirus or the many other medical threats ailing the world.

Unlike Kennedy, the scientists who produced the colon cancer study have been careful not to oversell its meaning. They are not claiming to have proved that all seed oils are too dangerous for human consumption, which previous studies show is unlikely, and they are definitely not urging McDonald's to use beef tallow in making french fries -- a shift that would horrify cardiologists, who understand how saturated fats clog veins and arteries.

The Trump gang is bored by the nuances and variables that guide real science, which is why they despise its qualified practitioners and lionize a fraud like Bobby Kennedy. They love the sensational nonsense spread by charlatans like him, even if it kills hundreds of thousands of innocents, as it did during the pandemic. It's a proven method of sucking votes and money from gullible rubes.

Meanwhile, we learned this week that one of Kennedy's top advisers is a lawyer who has sued to halt distribution of the polio vaccine -- an insane effort that might even worry Trump, if he hears about it. So before Senate Republicans let Kennedy go wild, maybe they will think about how his bizarre notions could bring harm to their children and grandchildren. Unlike Kennedy, they might want to aim before they start firing.

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