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Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, has been undermining public trust in vaccines and overseeing crippling cuts to research across American science. And yet his “Make America Healthy Again” movement highlights themes more familiar in liberal circles: toxins in the environment, biodiversity, healthy eating. Kennedy has put junk food at the center of the political conversation, speaking about ultra-processed foods and their established links to chronic disease—despite President Donald Trump’s well-known reverence for fast food of all kinds. Marion Nestle, a leading nutrition researcher and the author of “Food Politics,” has written in depth on how money and politics affect our diet and our health, and about the ways that American research has been hampered by limited funding. She tells the physician and contributing writer Dhruv Khullar, who’s been reporting on the American diet, “It would be wonderful if R.F.K., Jr., could make the food supply healthier. I just think that, in order to do that, he’s going to have to take on the food industry, and I don’t think Trump has a history of taking on corporations of any kind. . . . I’ll believe it when I see it.”

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