For years I thought my lactose intolerance was just part of modern life, right up until I started traveling regularly to Rome. Suddenly the stomach pain and inflammation vanished. The same thing happened to friends dealing with gluten intolerance in the U.S., only to discover those same foods caused no issues in Italy, France, or Spain. The difference? Europe bans additives, dyes, pesticides, and preservatives that are still perfectly legal in the American food supply. In other words: the problem wasn’t my body. It was our system.
Americans have never counted calories with more obsession, never downloaded more health apps, never spent more on gyms, supplements, or prescription drugs. And yet we are the sickest we have ever been:
- Six in 10 Americans live with a chronic disease.
- One in four children now has allergies.
- Forty percent of adults are diabetic or prediabetic.
- One in six adults take antidepressants or anti-anxiety medications, even as suicidal despair rises to levels not seen since records began in 1941.
How does this happen in the richest country on earth?
At some point we accepted false assumptions that “health” is merely the management of biochemical symptoms. That the human person is a collection of systems to be regulated by drugs, instead of a soul-body unity made in the image and likeness of God. We siloed nutrition away from spirituality, and mental health away from community. The result is a population frantically trying to fix itself while being fed by industries that profit from dysfunction.
The healthcare apparatus is dominated by pharmaceutical interests that flourish when Americans are not well. The food industry is no better as it engineers products for shelf life and addiction, not nourishment. Even Catholic hospitals, once rooted in an incarnational vision of healing, are increasingly operating within a framework built for financial throughput and regulatory compliance rather than integrated human care.
This is why the move by Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. to launch “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) matters more than some Catholics might assume. MAHA at least begins from a correct anthropology: Human beings are not machines. Health is not a compartment but a way of life. That framing alone is a step forward in a landscape where both federal policy and most Catholic institutions have surrendered to industrial thinking.
That said, MAHA already stumbled badly with the approval of generic mifepristone, an act that undermines any claim to holistic care by sanctioning a chemical weapon against both mother and child. This is not a detail we can brush aside.
Neither can we ignore the misguided decision to support IVF as a “pro-life” policy, when we know the many innocent, unborn lives that are sacrificed in the process. If Secretary Kennedy truly wants to make America healthy again, he must turn the FDA away from chemical shortcuts to death or fake “pro-life” solutions and toward rapid approval of genuinely life-giving therapies and clean food systems with the same urgency used to fast-track abortion drugs.
The next test is coming quickly: the new federal dietary guidelines. Past guidelines were shaped not by what Americans actually needed, but by what billion-dollar food lobbies wanted to sell. If MAHA allows that cycle to repeat, nothing changes. But if Kennedy forces a break from that model — if he insists that health policy start from truth rather than profit — we may witness the first real shift in decades.
For Catholics in America, this is not a niche policy debate. It is a chance to recover a Catholic vision of health: food as gift, the body as temple, medicine as service to life, not management of decline. Mothers and fathers do not need to raise children that are biologically and spiritually exhausted by the industrialized system. Reforming healthcare and food policy is not a distraction from the mission of raising souls for the kingdom. After all, grace builds on nature.
If America is going to be renewed in health, the renewal will begin at the table, in the clinic, in how we feed and care for the communities we live in.
It is time — not just politically, but physically and spiritually — to Make America Healthy Again.
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