FDA Commissioner Marty Makary hinted on Sunday at shifting the U.S. healthcare system away from standard treatment to a more “proactive system.”
Makary had his first television interview since President Donald Trump‘s Make America Healthy Again Commission released its assessment on childhood chronic diseases. The former surgeon from Johns Hopkins University expressed his eagerness at the results of the report on Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures because it looks at the root causes of the epidemic and “calls for a transformation of our healthcare system.”
“We’ve got to stop and ask ourselves: Should we be focusing more on school lunch programs, not just putting every kid on Ozempic? We’ve got to talk about food as medicine and gut health and the microbiome. We’ve got to talk about environmental toxins that cause cancer, not just the chemo to treat it. And maybe we need to treat more diabetes with cooking classes, not just throwing insulin at people,” Makary said on Sunday. “This report is a fresh new approach that really calls for a transformation of our healthcare system from a reactionary system to a proactive system.”
The 70-page report largely pinned the epidemic of children’s declining health on large food corporations and the pharmaceutical industry because they influenced the science and safety standards for chemical exposures.
“This report talks about how we fix our broken healthcare system, by getting at the root causes and the ultimate issue that we’ve not been talking about, and that is the health of the population. When you have 40% of our nation’s children with a chronic disease, that portends a very expensive system. There are many things we can do even at the FDA addressing food which many people forget is the first letter of the FDA is food. It’s not just drugs,” Makary said.
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Chronic disease treatment accounts for 90% of U.S. medical costs, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is some $4.5 trillion every year. The CDC reports six in 10 adults in the United States have at least one chronic condition while four in 10 have two or more chronic diseases.
Makary has written a number of books outlining his criticisms of the healthcare system. His Senate confirmation hearing centered on fixing childhood obesity and healthcare transparency, and three Democrats voted in his favor: Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Sens. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH).
