Heather Heying: We are a chronically sick people

"Children are not normally sick, but American children are, and ever more so. We are a chronically sick people and our children are following right in our footsteps. The solution to this is not, as the blue team would have us believe, to negotiate with pharma and make the drugs cheaper. Most of what ails America's children cannot be solved with pharmaceuticals.
President Biden claimed this summer that, quote, we have finally beaten pharma after all these years. Hardly. What the Biden-Harris administration did with their Inflation Reduction Act was to lower prices for prescription drugs. Okay. Instead of asking why so many children and their parents and almost all Americans who run so many pharmaceuticals in the first place. It is unprecedented. We must and we can make America healthy again. Starting with our children.
The solution does not lie with pharmaceuticals. The solution lies in part with food, real food, grown by real farmers, not sludge streamed up in a lab and put together in a factory. Our children are being made sick and miserable by what they eat. Most of it isn't food, doesn't deserve the name food. It is hyper-processed, full of agrochemicals, lacking nutrition, but full of addictive potential.
So many children now diabetic or pre-diabetic have metabolic syndrome, autism. This is new. These are new problems. Half of American children are overweight. Nearly half of them are obese. Children we're talking about. And yet, Ozempic and its pharmaceutical relatives, the newest magic pills with which to treat your ills, are being given to children as young as six years old.
Instead of medicating children to treat brand new illnesses, we need to address root causes and keep big food, big ag, and big pharma far away from our children."