Let’s save the Make America Healthy Again Commission, lots of time and money by providing them the solutions that are already workable if they have the political will to actually carry them out. Here I write out their major allegations in the recent White House executive order, and their possible solutions/ corrections of misrepresentations.

TLDR: Don’t let MAHA misrepresent a problem, and then misrepresent a solution. People get hurt when that happens.

1. Reduce Chronic Disease – this is an umbrella term for multiple health conditions that have multiple causes and multiple physiologies. The cause of Type 1 diabetes is already known – it is an autoimmune destruction of pancreas islet cells. Childhood obesity is definitely a problem. The misrepresentation occurs when the White House insinuates that all chronic diseases are caused by the same thing.

Solution – fund education into better eating and regular exercise. Most parts of America who don’t eat healthy either don’t know how to eat healthy, or can’t access it due to the social determinants of health – a longstanding public health principle known for decades. Your underserved neighborhood can’t eat healthy if they can’t access healthy food. Same goes for exercise – your people can’t exercise if they can’t access it or don’t know how to exercise with limited resources. The causes of childhood obesity are numerous, but the most easily fixable one is cessation of eating high calorie foods above and beyond your caloric expenditures (with the explicit acknowledgement that some people are genetically predisposed to be larger and thus require medicines to lose weight). The new administration could get the input of professionals who actually work in medical fields specializing in the diseases they claim to want to fix. I encourage being suspicious of a WH sponsored grifter who claims to sell exactly the supplements that are meant to “fix chronic disease” without adequate testing.

2. Investigate Environmental and lifestyle contributors – the two most serious allegations here are the effects of corporate influence and EMF on chronic diseases. You will only find articles on EMF and their relationship to health in health influencer/ woo/ naturopath circles. They may be loud, but they are wrong.

Solution: You shouldn’t try to plaster your face on a radio dish, but everyday exposure to EMF is just something that is naturally there in the environment. You won’t be able to block EMF totally: That would make your electronic devices fail. To really remove corporate influence – lets see them look hard at their own conflicts of interest, otherwise its just rules for thee and not for me. (https://campaignlegal.org/update/how-second-term-introduces-more-conflicts-interest-trump).

3. Assess the scope of childhood chronic diseases in America compared to other countries – The risk of asthma in America is higher than outside of America (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34755626); no new money needs to be spent on re-investigating this. Same deal with obesity. For allergies, the rates are more variable (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9643741/).

Solutions: To decrease obesity, see #1 above. Social determinants of health that contribute to obesity have been chronically underfunded and under-addressed.

4. Evaluate the over-use of medications – the allegation is that kids are generally overmedicated with a variety of medication types. It’s important to give credit where credit is due – several institutions, including the CDC, do in fact warn that the kids of America may be receiving excessive psychotropic drugs.

Solution: The simplest solution is – government should not be interfering in the healthcare decisions of individual people, that should be between the doctor and the patient (normally that is what a conservative party supports). The more long lasting solution is to take a nuanced approach to these medications. Psychiatry, psychology, developmental-behavioral pediatrics, and staff who support them, have long been underfunded and overstretched. When that happens, waiting times can be long, and evaluations can be abbreviated. A heavy-handed approach in taking away medications that genuinely help some Americans will clearly cause harm. A starting point could be supporting the people who can conduct more detailed analyses and guide patients towards the social support they might actually need, so that a psychotropic medication is no longer needed. Example – a poorer person living in a trailer park below the poverty line might need Buspar for anxiety, but the anxiety might go away if the socioeconomic problems go away.

5. Healthy food systems – Many different issues going on, from antibiotic resistance, to additives, to sustainability of industrial farming, to degree of food processing, but lets talk about a big one. This is code for saying the new administration doesn’t agree with many of the tenets of industrial agriculture (curiously, many of them voted for the new US administration). They want more organic produce. The problem is, organic farming in its current iteration is insufficient for the food needs of our country (and its exports). Organic farming is also not pesticide free – critters like our food too and will want to eat it, so they use different pesticides, and at times, greater quantities.

Solution: What you really need is agricultural leaders engaging in the political process and teaching the politicians what the policies should be. At least two things are minimally controversial. One, that exposure to pesticides via spills is clearly harmful to farmers (but they already know how to protect themselves against these). Pesticides in small quantities don’t generally harm the end user/ grocery shopper. Two, there are countries that have already tried full organic farming (Sri Lanka https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhHY-WTCJcM ), and it was an unmitigated disaster. Individual regions may be free to try organic farming but, it cannot sustainably feed a country the size of America.

TLDR: Don’t let MAHA misrepresent a problem, and then misrepresent a solution. People get hurt when that happens.