Street View: At ‘Take Back Your Health Tour’ in Austin, Secretary Kennedy Crusades Against ‘the Great Poisoning’

By Frances Scott, Contributor, The MAHA Report

On Thursday, February 26, the Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s simple message reverberated throughout Brazos Hall in downtown Austin, as he rolled into the Lone Star State to persuade Americans to start eating real food.

Over 600 people gathered to hear Kennedy champion the health benefits of switching to a ‘real food’ diet and jettison what he called ‘food-like substances’ – i.e. anything borderline edible that’s processed, packaged and squirted out the back of a factory.

The Austin event follows Secretary Kennedy’s ‘Take Back Your Health Tour’ stops in Philadelphia, PA and Nashville, TN.

Kennedy joined forces with American health policy leaders, farmers, health influencers, and citizens from all over the nation in declaring that most of what we’ve been eating for years… is not real food.

[For a livestream of the event, watch here]

A HHS and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) joint initiative that Kennedy unveiled in January, the ‘Eat Real Food’ campaign simplifies the improvements HHS made to the Dietary Guidelines for America 2025-2030, also known as the food pyramid.

It was the first significant change to federal food policy in decades.

‘Eat Real Food’ received unprecedented exposure during the Super Bowl, when MAHA Center Inc. ran a 30-second, national advertisement featuring Mike Tyson sharing that he’d lost a sister to obesity — a heart attack killed her at age 25 — and that he was once addicted to junk food himself.

Culture of the Insatiable

Attendees Thursday shared stories of never having eaten much real food when they were kids and young adults.

They’d grown addicted to the processed ‘food-like substances.’ Slaves to their insatiable cravings, they hated themselves for lacking self control, hated how their bodies looked and felt and, fed up, finally switched to eating real food.

And their bodies rebounded.

Kennedy has often explained that our food conglomerates have known for years the non-food ingredients they were adding to their products were not healthy for humans but made their products more addictive. The industry-captured government looked the other way. The net result was higher profits for the shareholders and corporations and sicker Americans.

Because our regulatory bodies allowed the companies to ‘self regulate,’ as long as the companies promised the FDA they’d tested all their ingredients, and the tests had concluded the additives were ‘generally recognized as safe’ (GRAS), the FDA never made a fuss.

The European Union uses a ‘precautionary principle,’ allowing product regulators to see what was tested and proven safe. In the U.S., Kennedy says, additives are allowed until something happens and we realize they’re actually harmful.

Tales of the Infirm

Most speakers at Thursday’s Eat Real Food event offered stories similar to Mike Tyson’s. They served as a collective reflection of government misguidance, corporate capture and malfeasance.

Boomers, Gen X and Millennials recounted high school coaches talking to them about the importance of ’carb loading’ and sending the team out for pizza and pasta the night before every game, match and meet.

Dave Asprey, founder of Bulletproof Coffee who, years ago, began promoting ‘biohacking’ as a way to increase longevity, recalled being three hundred pounds. That was before he decided to start eating real food.

A young woman, Vanessa Bighinatti, talked about being in her early twenties with pain all over her body from an antibiotic-resistant type of Lyme infection that damaged her nervous system. At 24, she had to use a cane to get around. Realizing her doctors weren’t helping, she decided to clean up her diet. She gave up processed food, began eating real food and saw her pain and mobility problems vanish.

A Concerned Farmer

Zach Lahn flew from Iowa to Austin to attend ‘Eat Real Food’ because of concerns about what’s been happening in American agriculture.

Generations of Lahn’s family farmed corn, soybeans, cattle, and just about anything that would grow in Iowa. He said Big Ag’s growing dominance, everywhere crops can be grown, threatens all family and organic farms that produce without chemical fertilizers, pesticides, desiccants like glyphosate and genetically modified, patented seeds.

“Family farms are dying off,” Lahn said. “We have three big agriculture companies that are really exploiting our farmers. And Iowa has the fastest rate of new cancer anywhere in the history of civilization.”

Despite never having run for office, what was happening to Iowa’s food producers inspired Lahn to run for governor.

The Unwell

Some at ‘Eat Real Food’ balked at all the prior administrations’ failure to acknowledge how sick and heavy many Americans are growing.

A quick scan of any 1950s or 1960s picture taken near a body of water, or Tod Papageorge’s photographs of American beach bodies in the Seventies and Eighties prove, in those days, there was nary a muffin top, beer belly, double chin or baby elephant-sized human to see.

Contrast those with today’s barely-clad Americans, frolicking at pools and water parks.

It took approximately two generations of incorrect guidance and the allowance of potentially harmful ingredients for the American physique to morph from svelte and chiseled to having a body reminiscent of the AXIOM people of WALL-E. (Talk about Andrew Stanton’s prescience…)

Innovations in canning, freezing, food preservation, transportation and refrigeration turned companies’ food products into products that might not spoil as quickly as real food, making it a more lucrative investment.

By the 1950s, psychology had become better understood as a sharp sales tool. Marketing had emerged as an industry of its own, and if Pharma’s taught us anything, it’s that marketing works. It worked for Big Tobacco. It works for Big Pharma. It works for Big Food.

No-fault divorces, women’s liberation and the rise of organized activities for children after school meant fewer hours spent at home, less time for cooking and more people buying and eating processed products instead of real food.

In the Eighties, the government declared eating fat was bad, so we stopped eating it. We cooked with Crisco and put Nutrasweet in our tea. We drank Tab, Diet Coke and Crystal Light, and ate refined flour pasta, bagels, cereal, crackers, SnackWells, Fat Free Fig Newtons and anything else marketed as fat free. Our blood sugar spiked and tanked along with our insulin. The yo-yo-ing left us ravenous. We did what they’d said. We went fat free and ended up getting fatter. Plus our rates of heart disease, stroke and cancer began to skyrocket.

The Upside Down Food Pyramid

Secretary Kennedy told his Austin audience how he and his team turned the food pyramid upside down: “We got the best nutritionists in the country from the best universities, and we said, ‘We gotta come up with science-based guidelines,’ and I thought it would take a month. It ended up taking eleven months, because there were knowledge gaps. It’s just regulatory malpractice. Nobody’d studied a lot of this stuff. So we came up with the food pyramid, which we can summarize in three words: eat real food.”

The crowd grew still when Kennedy revealed the downstream effects that not eating real food has had on American children.

“When I was ten years old, when my uncle was president, the average pediatrician at that time would see one case of juvenile diabetes over a forty or fifty-year career,” he said. “Now 38 percent of teens are diabetic or pre-diabetic.”

As the initiative’s government website details, today 50% of Americans have either diabetes or pre-diabetes, 75% of adults have at least one chronic condition, and 90% of all healthcare spending in the U.S. is used to pay for treatments for chronic conditions. Some, like type II diabetes, can be reversed with lifestyle changes like intermittent fasting, exercise, limiting carbs, cutting sugar and all processed foods in favor of… eating real food.

Do doctors really not know?

If they do, why don’t their patients?

Kennedy said doctors tell him they don’t feel comfortable counseling their patients about their diets because their medical training offered so little about nutrition.

Kennedy added that what’s happened to Americans’ health has not happened because we suddenly got lazy. It’s happened because our government has not been forthcoming and because, basically, it allowed companies to self regulate, putting whatever they wanted in their products including hundreds of things other countries have banned.

The Remedy Revolution

Kennedy detailed the censorship he endured for about 24 years due to the things he said publicly about our biggest industries, specifically what their products were doing to our children.

“I prayed every day for 19 years that God would put me in a place where I could end this chronic disease epidemic,” he said, pausing when the crowd cheered.

“And then, in August of 2024, God sent me… Donald Trump,” he said, pausing for effect before adding. “It was really unexpected…”

The crowd laughed, and Kennedy smiled.

“But the president has been amazing to me,” he added. “He did everything he promised and more. He put me on his transition team. He allowed me to pick all of my agency heads, and that has never been done in history. The HHS Secretary does not get to pick who’s head of CDC, FDA, NIH, et cetera, and he let me choose all those people, and for the last year he’s let me go against Big Pharma, Big Food, Big Insurance, Big Hospitals and all of these other ‘untouchables.’”

Three Cheers for Local Activism

Kennedy praised Texas for leading the nation in getting 25 Make America Healthy Again-backed bills passed at the state level. He asked Carrie Isaac to stand up and praised her for her efforts as the head of Texas’ MAHA caucus.

“It’s the state legislations,” Kennedy said. “it’s what you do on the ground here that really empowers me to go and convene these corporations. We’ve done it with so many other industries now, and they’ve been extraordinarily cooperative, because they don’t want to deal with you guys here, the grassroots. So, thank you.”

Kennedy added that seeing MAHA’s success in state legislatures terrified food companies and forced them to show up at HHS, eager to accept the changes Kennedy and MAHA wanted regarding food dyes and additives.

“They didn’t want fifty sets of rules in fifty different markets,” Kennedy said, “so they said, ‘We want to do what you tell us to do, so the states don’t impose this jigsaw puzzle of regulatory frameworks around the country that we simply can’t deal with.”

Kennedy ended his remarks with details of his push for mandates, requiring doctors to take nutrition courses, both in medical schools and as part of the Continuing Medical Education courses they have to take to maintain professional licensure and good standing with their respective boards.

The Next Right Move

There are two commonly recited quotes from Hippocrates: one, for the doctors - ’First do no harm’; and one, for the patients – ’Let food be thy medicine.’

Decades of failing to let food be our medicine have hurt us, individually and as a nation.

With a larger percentage of our population suffering from chronic disease, fewer people are healthy enough to work; more are supported by federal disability benefits; and fewer workers are creating wealth, buying and selling assets and paying taxes.

At the same time, having a country full of people who regularly go to doctors, take tests, receive treatments, pay copays, premiums and deductibles, buy prescription drugs and have surgeries, has made healthcare one of this nation’s most profitable industries. By 2018, healthcare had overtaken manufacturing as North America’s number one provider of jobs.

Revenue wise, healthcare still stands second only to governments and school systems.

The sickening part is… if we take Kennedy’s advice, eat real food and get healthier, there will be less demand for healthcare and thus, fewer jobs.

However, if we never get well, the snowball-effect of chronic illness, enriching an already wealthy industry that then prescribes more treatments that cause more side effects for which it prescribes more treatments that cause more side effects… well, you can see where this is headed.

The only way off the healthcare nightmare merry-go-round, as Kennedy keeps telling us, is to eat real food. That way, when the changes come, as they always do, the majority of us will be healthy enough to adapt.