RFK Jr's perversion of chemistry

On chemistry and MAHA

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Since 1925, obesity has increased worldwide from very low levels to epidemic proportions. The most dramatic rises have occurred since the 1970s.

The global prevalence of obesity has nearly tripled since 1975, now affecting over one billion people.

If you listen to RFK Jr and his MAHA coalition, you’ll hear a host of reasons: food dyes, seed oils, glyphosate—any chemical that isn’t testosterone replacement or spray tans.

But what he’s missing is the most obvious chemical that has helped cause this epidemic, which is the very same chemical responsible for their being 8 billion people being alive today: nitrogen.

The story of nitrogen explains why so many of us are alive (and not starving) today, and it plays a key role in some of the biological and environmental problems that now plague us.

The story of nitrogen shows why Kennedy’s solutions to our health crises are so ill-founded, though it makes sense given how little the man understands chemistry in the first place.

This all became clear to me while reading Thomas Hager’s 2008 book, The Alchemy of Air.

The book explores the groundbreaking work of Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, two German scientists whose invention, the Haber-Bosch process, revolutionized the production of fixed nitrogen from atmospheric nitrogen.

This created the fertilizer that’s responsible for improving yields globally.

Early in the book, Hager writes:

As a species we long ago passed the natural ability of the planet to support us with food. Even using the best organic farming practices available, even cutting back our diets to minimal, vegetarian levels, only about four billion of us could live on what the earth and traditional farming supply.

Now at the end, he qualifies this, writing

Our health problem is not malnutrition, but conditions related to being overweight, from diabetes to heart disease.

Now the book is about a lot more. The Haber-Bosch process not only supplied us with fertilizer to grow unprecedented quantities of food, but also the raw materials for explosives and chemical warfare.

He argues that World War 1 would have been a lot shorter without this technology, and the Germans would have not been nearly in the same position to launch World War II.

It’s also not lost that a Jewish scientist is effectively responsible for Zyklon-B, which was used in Nazi gas chambers.

Fascinating, horrifying story, yet also the reason roughly half of us are alive today.

There’s one moment when Hager is writing about Fritz Haber’s wife, Clara, who was the first German woman to achieve a doctorate in chemistry, and was a well-known champion of the women’s right movement.

She saw how her husband’s technology was being used to slaughter people. As Hager writes,

She loved chemistry. This was a perversion.

And it made me think of all the ways that chemistry is being perverted by Kennedy and MAHA today.

Seed oils are not unhealthy.

Multiple large-scale studies and meta-analyses have consistently found that replacing saturated fats (like butter or lard…or beef tallow) with unsaturated fats from seed oils lowers LDL cholesterol.

Higher intake of polyunsaturated fatty acids, particularly linoleic acid (which is an omega-6 found in seed oils), is associated with lower risk of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes.

Scientific evidence does not support the idea that omega-6 fatty acids in seed oils are pro-inflammatory. Only a small fraction of dietary omega-6 is converted into inflammatory compounds, and many studies show that higher omega-6 intake is linked to reduced inflammation.

Food dyes have a tiny effect on health—typical dietary exposure for most people is below the levels causing harm in animal studies—and are not driving chronic diseases.

Nor are vaccines, which are some of the greatest public health interventions in history, and which Kennedy has been perverting for decades.

America does have health problems, and some of them are caused by abundance, as Hager correctly identifies.

But we’re not the only country grappling with these issues, not in the outsized manner MAHA pretends is reality.

Plus, a whole lot of them are still the fault of lack: a lack of access to good nutrition, health care, and basic resources.

The Germans perverted chemistry to create some of the most horrific crimes against humanity in recorded history.

And I fear that Kennedy is perverting it in a way that’s going to cause a lot of damage downstream.

The conspiratorial lens through which some chemicals are viewed, while others get a free pass, is pointing directly to the ambitions of a fully privatized healthcare market in America.

Which is only going to create more abundance for those who profit from that system, or can already afford to partake in it.

Meanwhile, the people who need health care the most are going to be locked out of a system many already have problems accessing.

And when the population health data keeps getting worse, Kennedy is just going to shrug his shoulders while sipping on his protein foam Starbucks or whatever the fuck they’re working on.