Nutrition

The Executive Order establishing President Trump’s Make America Healthy Again Commission presented some big, fat, sobering truths. “Six in ten Americans have at least one chronic disease,” the order says, “and four in ten have two or more chronic diseases.” It also notes that our people don’t live, on average, as long as those in other developed nations: 78.8 years in the US compared to 82.6 years in our cousin countries. How did this happen? How did the world’s most powerful nation ever get to the point where 77 percent of its youth can’t qualify for military service and we need a commission to stop us from spiraling faster and faster down the Doritos Loco Tacos-Ozempic highway? Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

In fifth grade my class read Tuck Everlasting, by Natalie Babbitt, the story of a ten- year-old girl who stumbles on a family of immortals, the Tucks, who impress upon her that eternal life is unnatural and actually a curse. The novel had a profound effect on me. I became obsessed with the book and with the relationship of life to death. One passage in particular has haunted me for decades. “You can’t have living without dying. So you can’t call it living, what we got,” the patriarch, Angus Tuck, says. “We just are, we just be, like rocks beside the road.” I’ve been thinking about this book a lot since I became aware of the tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson.

Consume American media for more than five minutes, and sandwiched between advertisements for KFC $5 Fill-Ups and a dramatic Golden Corral short pondering the age-old question, “Chicken tenders or baby back ribs?,” you’re bound to behold at least a half-dozen ads for prescription drugs. They tend to last longer than the straight-to-the-glutton-button fast-food commercials, and they play over and over and over again (who doesn’t know the Oh, Oh, Oh, Ozempic! jingle by now?) — and airtime ain’t cheap. “When Oprah Winfrey’s bombshell interview with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle aired in March 2021, the British tuned in, and many were gobsmacked at the number of drug commercials they saw,” Vox reported earlier this year.