The Daily Signal - Why Young People Are Drawn to RFK Jr’s ‘Make America Healthy Again’ Agenda | Tammy Born Huizenga

Episode Date: April 19, 2025

Young people have rejected the "trust the science" mentality of older generations, paving the way for acceptance of the concept of "Make America Healthy Again," according to a holistic doctor in Grand Rapids, Michigan. "I grew up in an era of thinking if it was that bad for us, it really shouldn't be put in our foods, and I'm sure the government wouldn't allow that," Dr. Tammy Born Huizenga, who owns and operates a preventive health care clinic, told The Daily Signal in an interview. "And it turns out they were allowing it. And your generation is like, 'I'm not sure I'm gonna trust the government in making all these decisions for me.'" Nearly 60% of Americans have heard about Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s "Make American Healthy Again" agenda, and the majority have a favorable view of the movement, which involves promoting healthier ingredients in foods, healthier school lunches, reducing the use of food dyes and corn syrup, and eliminating fluoride from tap water. The COVID-19 pandemic brought the problems with American health care into focus, Huizenga said. Tune in to find out what happens next: Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You have more options of educating your support. You have more available to you on your iPhone than anyone my age ever had. We never questioned the establishment. We just assumed that what they were doing was best for us. I'm at the annual leadership conference with Dr. Tammy Born Heisinga. You specialize in treating chronic diseases, particularly, and the health secretary, RFK Jr. has spoken a lot about how common those have become. I believe six and ten American, something like that, have chronic diseases.

diseases. What do you see as the solution to that? Well, we have to find out why people are getting sick, right? And that's what I love to do. I love when people come in and say, okay, here's what I have. Here's what I've tried. I've looked it up. I do all my research, which I enjoy when patients come in and have done other research and say, okay, I think we should go down this route. Or if they say, I have exhausted all options, let's just dig in and figure out my body, right? So there are so many really cool new tests that are available that we can really figure people out pretty well now. Not perfectly, but if we find out, for example, what a patient should and shouldn't eat, every person is different as far, what foods are good for them or what foods are reacting,

find out what their nutritional status is. For example, almost everyone's low in magnesium. Well, low magnesium can cause sleep problems, anxiety, memory problems, heart problems, blood pressure. It was just a lot of reasons why people are diagnosed or something that may be treated nutritionally. And then we've just got to change the poisons in our diet. Sugar, we've got to get rid of a lot of that sugar that we're addicted to. So addicting. I've long told my children, you're in control of two things. What goes in your mouth and what comes out of your mouth. So that's an important part of getting healthy is what we eat. A big topic on improving

how Americans eat is that, of course, we want Americans to have the freedom to eat whatever they want, but we also want to prevent diseases, all the bad things that come from, eating unhealthy. What can we do to raise food standards without infringing on Americans' freedom? I think education is a key. I think if you were given a choice of eating a food with or without pesticides and herbicides or giving out the choice of a food let's say let's say price was equal um i think people would choose the the food that doesn't have the as many chemicals on it unfortunately prices for organic foods are generally higher and so we have to pick and choose there's uh there's a website i think they they go over the different foods it's called the clean

15 and the dirty dozen there are some food that we shouldn't eat if they because they absorb toxins easily. Like the thin skin berries. Yes, they like a raspberry. If you're going to spray raspberry bush, it will absorb those pesticides early, or easier, I should say. So, but there are a lot of foods like bananas or coconut have a thicker skinned avocado. It probably doesn't matter as much. But as much as we can, I think we should eat as clean as possible. It's all about educating, educating our parents so that we can give our children the best food. I think the government has taken the role in looking at the food colorings and how we can get those out of our foods and just to be educated. What could be causing our illnesses?

How much does eating food that was grown in the U.S. matter? Well, both negatively and positively, I mean, yes. I mean, farmers generally use a lot of pesticides in the United States. There's a lot of pesticides and herbicides that are used except for the organic farms. And so a lot of our food does have chemicals on it, especially the grains. Unfortunately, when we started genetically modifying the grains so that we would get more yield, so we can grow more food for much more of the world, that That also included adding more chemicals to our soils.

And then the soils get depleted of nutrients. And then those chemicals get incorporated into our foods. And I think some of these things, our bodies just weren't ready for them. I think it's changed our metabolism. It's changed how well our body works, especially our immune systems. And 70% of our immune system starts right in our intestinal tract. I think that's where we have to be really careful of how we. eat. Something that Secretary Kennedy has also talked about is raising our food standards to be more

like that of Europe where corn syrup, dyes, like you mentioned, are abandoned foods. What can we do to catch up to them in that way? Again, if parents knew what was going into their child wasn't healthy, that I think we would make decisions and base those decisions on good sound science of of teaching us, teaching people in general what it is, how important it is to eat healthy. And it's clear that our bodies weren't ready for all these pesticides that they've changed us. They've changed as metabolically. They've raised the obesity rates. And so many of us are addicted to sugar.

And if you look at what children are fed in the morning, even in our school breakfast and lunch programs, Yeah, there's a lot of corn syrup and unhealthy seed oils, things that have been used to get us food that's less expensive. But in the short run, it might be less expensive. I think in the long run, you have to realize getting sick is much more expensive than staying healthy. There are so many things, of course, that Americans can be doing to improve their health after such a lack of awareness about these types of topics for so many years. If you had to pick just a few things that health and human services can focus on to really improve Americans' health as soon as possible, what do you think would be at the forefront of that? A few things. I think number one is less sugar, don't doubt. Let's get the corn syrup and the high-fructose corn sweeteners out of our foods so that we have healthier foods in general. I think if we had a choice of not eating foods that had pesticides and herbicides on it, I think we would choose.

those foods. And our bodies just run better with less chemicals, as I said. And the food colorings, I think many of them are toxic. And we should look into healthier ways to produce foods in generally. We need food, right? You have to have calories. But healthy calories better more than unhealthy calories. Absolutely. Another big topic has been fluoride in our water. That's something the secretary has had a big push to fix. Why is that such a big deal? I think the more research we do on fluoride, the more we find that it really is causing more harm than good. That is my opinion. It is the opinion of many researchers, but not everybody. Not everybody believes that. And many dentists will say, especially that, no, we need that fluoride for our strong teeth.

But I'm not so convinced. Personally, I have an allergy to it. So I will actually, break out into a rash if I use a fluoridated toothpaste. So it's definitely a sensitivity for many patients. But especially if you think about a small baby and we're giving that baby water or formula, there's a lot of fluoride in that water for a little, a small baby to be able to handle. And I think the research is pointing at their downsides. recently the fluoride has been shown to affect our pineal gland. That pineal gland is a really important gland that produces our melatonin. And so maybe even affecting sleep and the

control of our body during sleep, it's a possibility. And I've seen more research lately, but more has to be done on this, on the fluoride issue. And I think once we once we do the right research, which I'm sure RFK is ready to do, we will see that pure water, H2O is probably better than water that has fluoride in it. In the meantime, what do you recommend Americans do to make sure that they're having clean water before we reach these things? There are a certain water filter you recommend. You recommend bottled water, but then you have the plastic bottles as an issue.

What would you recommend? It seems like an uphill battle with clean water. It is. There are some good filters out there. We use a reverse osmosis filter in our house and at my office, and that we have those filters change regularly. I think that water is healthier. I think, again, the closer we get to H2O, the better.

But then, you know, that they're taking out some of the good minerals too. But if we are eating healthy, I think the recommendation of taking a good multivitamin of mineral every day is important also. replace some of those minerals. But reverse osmosis water is probably the best. But if that's not available or if it's more expensive, I know some of those water filters that you can just pour your tap water into are, I have good ratings and seem to be doing a good job. And something that you talked about in your speech just a few minutes ago was about how doctors are so quick to prescribe patients with long medicine regimes, regiments, instead of thinking about more holistic options like

diet, exercise, that kind of thing. What can HHS do to work on that? And what is your advice to just individual doctors to fix that issue? Well, I think doctors need to be educated more. And I think doctors need to have a little bit more open minds. We get out of medical school, We go through years of training and we get stuck in our box sometimes. And doctors, you know, they're smart people. They're insightful, intelligent. But if we get stuck in a box where we say this is the only thing that works for high blood pressure or these chronic diseases, then we lose our insight into how each patient could work and each patient is different.

And so many, many people come to me as a position that I would say kind of looks outside that box and say, not every person is right. Not every person needs a blood pressure medicine when their blood pressure is high. Not every person needs an anti-inflammatory or an antidepressant. Let's find out why that person is depressed. And it is something that is not taught in medical school. And it should be. Doctors stop asking questions.

We get all. of our medical advice and all of the many, many, high percentage of the studies that we learn from and that we read and are tested on, tell us that, you know, if someone has a blood pressure, here's your first line treatment of the medication, here's the second line treatment, and there's a recipe that is called the standard of care. And it's probably not what's best for us. I still write prescriptions. I'm not saying that that's bad, but I think we should look at what is ultimately causing the problem. And that's just not tied to medical school. So I think education is the key here. There have been a lot of cuts so far in just a few months at

HHS, both of employees that are deemed unnecessary or ineffective and also of grants to some pretty radical causes. I think a lot of Americans would be pretty shocked to hear about. So what do you think, why do you think it's been necessary to have that kind of purge of the department and what do you hope to see that accomplish? I think RFK has made it really clear what his priorities are. And that's different than the philosophies of the past. And I love that. I think we do need to reset here. We've been going down a path where the pharmaceutical companies have controlled the narrative. They control 93% of all the studies that we, that we, that we, we read. They control the research. They control the medical schools. And now we realize that many of

them are, there's money that comes in controlling FDA and the people doing the study and the people approving the medications. And so I think if we can get back to real science, science that's unbiased, science that gives us answers that might not be pharmaceutical based, that we can look for causes of illness rather than just prescription solutions, think we'll be better. Again, I write prescriptions every day in practice. There is a balance here. Now we have to integrate practice that is medically and prescription-based,

along with a philosophy of looking at why people are sick. And that is, I think, the key of going forward. And I hope that's what Secretary Kennedy is planning also. One prescription in particular that Secretary Kennedy has promised he's going to study is potential dangerous effects on women of the abortion pill. What do you expect to see come out of that? I have not heard of that study or his priority with that one. So I'm not really good at that one. Is there anything else you'd like to add?

I'm really excited about what is happening at HHS. When I heard RFK and Secretary Kennedy talk about his plans and his priorities, it was just such an eye-opening experience. And I'm really excited that we can make some real changes by educating the public. People your age are much more interested than people my age. We were, I grew up in an era of thinking, if it was that bad for us, it really shouldn't be put in our foods. And I'm sure the government wouldn't allow that. And it turns out they were allowing it.

And people in your age and your generation is like, I'm not sure I'm going to trust the government to making all these decisions for me. And COVID really brought that to light, that maybe there are forces that. aren't looking at our best interests at the government level that we should be questioning everything. And let's question the establishment rules right now. That's so interesting. Why do you think, I agree with you, why do you think that young people are more likely to question the status quo? You have more options of educating yourself. You have more available to you on your iPhone or on your computer than anyone my age ever.

head. And so we never questioned the establishment documents. We just assumed that what they were doing was best for us. And I think everyone's eyes really were opened up of an education process and medicine that maybe they haven't had our best interest in minds when they made decisions for us. So let's continue down that path. Let's question everything. And I love that. about your generation, that you're willing to hold our feet to the fire and say, hey, let's do us right. Thank you so much for joining us. It was just a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you, Elizabeth. It's really fun to be here. Subscribe to get the news. The legacy media won't tell you and only the daily signal can bring to you.

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