Melania Must Tackle Child Obesity, Succeed Where Obama Failed

Former First Lady Melania Trump is already preparing to resurface as a presidential spouse next year, and she has an opportunity to drive change and forge unity in confronting the most desperate long-term health crisis in centuries.

Now running with the unprecedented endorsement of a legacy Kennedy, the Trump family may soon reclaim White House authority and with it the opportunity to pick up where former First Lady Michelle Obama left off. Childhood obesity represents one of the few issues on which the new Republican White House can reclaim moral authority and also galvanize a bipartisan political movement with a major push to end this destructive epidemic.

When the Obama family came into office, the epidemic of childhood obesity catalyzed what at first had seemed an optimistic initiative to tackle the health care crisis plaguing our children. By 2009, nearly 17 percent of children aged 2-19 were obese, representing a striking increase from just 5 percent in 1971. In 2017, the number had grown even higher, with more than 19 percent of children in America, or nearly 1 in 5, struggling with obesity. The number of kids and teens coping with “severe obesity” reached 6 percent for the first time ever by 2013, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The first lady’s movement obviously failed, and the campaign did so for two probable reasons: 1) half the country wrote off the celebrity-infused campaign as an unserious example of nanny-state finger-wagging from elites in D.C., and 2) a conspiracy of food and pharmaceutical interests successfully undermined the program.

Reeling from the 2008 financial crisis, stressed Americans struggled to refill their savings. Our neighbors didn’t want to be lectured by coastal elites about whatever substances they were using to cope, whether that was cheap, hyper-processed foods or marijuana, which states began to legalize in 2012. A country already frustrated with high gas prices was now being told to adhere to an expensive fat-free diet only to be told by their luxury “WeightWatchers” clinic their obesity exemplified a moral lack of willpower. Now we have books written by influencers embracing a white flag of surrender, influencers who obviously struggled with the significant consequences of long-term obesity and are now publishing nonsense about how their condition is “healthy.”

Corporate America has spent years backing the cultural currents that are already undermining a nationwide effort to combat childhood obesity. Campaigns sponsored by giant pharmaceutical companies and powerful political lobbyists endorsed “health at every size” and glorified an America transformed by decades of bad nutrition science into a lucrative resource that could be mined for health care dollars.

Big Pharma’s proposal coming off the coronavirus lockdowns? Invasive surgeries and expensive new cocktails of pharmaceutical elixirs to inject into children. The GLP-1 drugs that have revolutionized the West’s apathetic approach to obesity have made the pharmaceutical industry so much money that the revenues have fundamentally reshaped the economy of Denmark.

When Obama’s “Let’s Move” initiative was launched, the nation’s business elites publicly got on board against the ballooning obesity crisis, but industry suppliers of the nation’s favorite coping substances — industrialized foods — were too big a behemoth to challenge behind the scenes. California pediatric endocrinologist Robert Lustig wrote about his frustration with the “Let’s Move” programs in his 2021 book, Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine.

“In May 2011, I shared the dais at a Culinary Institute of America meeting with Sam Kass, Michelle Obama’s personal chef and her point person for her Childhood Obesity Task Force,” Lustig recounted. “I got twenty minutes in the Green Room alone with him, and he admitted to me that everyone in the White House, including the president, had read the April 2011 New York Times Magazine article ‘Is Sugar Toxic,’ in which our [University of California San Francisco] research was featured.”

The article, written by author and nutrition journalist Gary Taubes, implicated sugar as the primary root cause of obesity and chronic disease after decades of Americans embracing the catastrophic low-fat diet.

Kass and the Obama White House “wished me well,” Lustig wrote, “but they would do absolutely nothing to help. No endorsement, mention, not even a wink or a nod. They didn’t want the fight with the food industry; the Obama administration had enough enemies.”

American obesity continued to swell long after Obama’s tenure, but none of that increase is a mystery to anyone who wrote off or ignored the federal government’s crusade to manipulate human behavior. J.D. Vance, the senator from Appalachian Ohio who is now on the edge of a lead role in a new administration, wrote about this dismissiveness in his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. Vance noted that whenever Michelle Obama “tells us that we shouldn’t be feeding our children certain foods,” his neighbors would “hate her for it.” But “not because we think she’s wrong but because we know she’s right.”

The country is no doubt far sicker more than 10 years after Michelle Obama launched an initiative to tackle childhood obesity. Roughly 1 in 3 Americans have at least one chronic disease, while 42 percent have two or more. Obesity is merely a symptom of an underlying metabolic dysfunction that drives the proliferation of chronic illness.

While Americans scoffed at the initial White House efforts to promote healthy living, the political dynamics have now changed, and no one can afford to wait much longer to confront the pantry monster. The coronavirus pandemic, where nearly 80 percent of those hospitalized were overweight or obese, offered Americans the wake-up call on which too many slept when lockdowns closed gyms and take-out was recommended.

A Trump campaign against childhood obesity would come with the added benefit of being initiated amidst an ongoing renaissance in nutrition. The initiative would also serve as an obvious bipartisan bridge that Trump has already leveraged to build alliances between left and right coalitions, most notably with left-wing environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Kennedy has made clear his demand to have a seat at the table in the new administration, where transforming the incumbent sick-care model is a major priority. In a cabinet post, Kennedy, unintimidated by the food industry, might be able to finally bust the catastrophic myth of the low-fat diet, but the movement will still require a colossal second crusade — which has a better chance of success with more first lady activism.

No issue would be more perfect for Melania Trump to handle given the near universal acknowledgment of the pesticide-infested low-fat scandal. As mentioned above, the absolute weight of the chronic disease epidemic has already forged an unprecedented endorsement from a prominent Kennedy, whose ex-staffers launched an organization to “Make America Healthy Again.” Jeff Hutt, a spokesman for the new political action committee, told The Federalist earlier this month that the campaign will likely earn Kennedy a senior role in a potential Trump White House, possibly as secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS). Hutt said the PAC plans to leverage the cross-ideological agreement around personal health to help Trump win in November and support future candidates beyond.

“The dialogue still hasn’t been settled,” Hutt said, as critics of the pharma-driven Ozempic era are now written off by regime-friendly media elites who’ve attacked the dedication to personal health and wellness as an exercise in far-right extremism.

In April, for example, The New York Times published a column by Michelle Goldberg who wrote that while “there are still some progressive figures in Kennedy’s orbit, his campaign has an increasingly right-wing vibe.” Goldberg took aim at Kennedy’s pedestal on “alternative health” in particular.

“Some strains of New Age wellness culture — with its distrust of mainstream expertise, moralistic view of health and weakness for quackery — have long intersected with right-wing politics,” Goldberg wrote. “The connection between alternative medicine and conservatism grew significantly stronger during the pandemic, as the center of gravity in the anti-vaccine movement moved rightward, while longtime right-wingers grew increasingly mistrustful of Big Pharma, and with it, Big Food.”

In other words, healthy eating is apparently no longer a statist lever pulled under Michelle Obama but an esoteric ritual embraced by Republican allies. A commitment to fitness an proper nutrition, however, should be a shared goal for everyone.

Chronic disease will obviously be a top priority in the new Trump-led enterprise, and a supermodel campaign to eliminate childhood obesity could offer the extra steam needed for the mission’s success. Another first lady initiative steered in partnership with Kennedy’s plans could become a hallmark triumph of Melania Trump’s legacy.

Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at [email protected]. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.