Secretary Kennedy: Our Diet is Feeding a Divine Malaise

Is America’s addiction to ultra processed food contributing to a crisis of Divine dimension?

According to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., United States’ maverick Secretary of Health and Human Services, it’s a major contributing factor.

Since assuming office in early 2025, Secretary Kennedy has worked to reshape and reimagine the federal health care agency on numerous fronts. From recasting and inverting the “Food Pyramid” to banning artificial dyes from food to revising vaccine guidelines and cutting red tape and waste, it’s been anything but business as usual at HHS.

Appearing on the Joe Rogan podcast last week, Secretary Kennedy spent considerable time lamenting the many health woes plaguing Americans, especially children.

“When I was a kid, the typical pediatrician would see one case of juvenile diabetes over a 40- or 50-year career,” he told the popular podcaster. “Today, 38% of teens are diabetic or pre-diabetic.”

He added:

“The obesity rates have gone from five percent in kids when I was a kid, now close to 20 percent … 70 percent of adults are obese or overweight. That was not true when we were kids. And it’s not because Americans got indolent or lazy or hungry, it’s because they were being mass poisoned.”

It’s the use of that type of language that some don’t like, suggesting Secretary Kennedy is speaking in hyperbole. When most people think of being “poisoned” they think of food laced with cyanide not children eating Cheetos and Chex Mix.

But the “Make American Healthy Again Movement” has been sweeping in its scope, aiming to rid certain foods of toxic chemicals — and encouraging Americans to eat more whole and natural food.

So, what’s the connection to junk food and Jesus?

Talking with Joe Rogan, Secretary Kennedy suggested “Americans have forgotten how to cook.” Instead of spending hours in the kitchen together, and then more time around the table talking and visiting and bonding, they’re heating up frozen meals in the microwave or grabbing dinner via the McDonald’s drive-thru.

“Cooking is really important because it’s important for family cohesion, for a sense of community,” observed Secretary Kennedy. “It’s a daily, almost sacred ritual. Taking that away from our lives has amplified the spiritual malaise that we’re in.”

Merriam-Webster defines a malaise as “a vague sense of mental or moral ill-being.”

A “spiritual malaise” can be marked by several measures, including a loss of moral absolutes, declining prayer and devotion, a rising secularism and an emphasis on material prosperity. 

Although Secretary Kennedy didn’t elaborate, he’s suggesting that many of our current problems can be eased or outright eliminated if families would spend wholesome, productive and consistent time together in the kitchen and around the family table.

Studies have repeatedly confirmed that children generally thrive in families where meals are shared together on a regular basis. And while the research may not break down distinctions between what type of food is consumed during those meals — it’s common sense that time is a critical ingredient in the equation. And because homemade food takes more time to prepare, it goes to show that the greater the duration together, the more durable the family unit will become.

Those studies have shown that children in families that sit down together between five and seven times a week are less likely to be substance abusers, have fewer emotional and behavioral problems and enjoy better communication as a family.

Joe Rogan is just speculating, but he reflected, “We should all be united on at least this. If people were a little healthier and they were a little more fit, they’d probably have a lot less anxiety, probably a lot less conflict when it comes to political disagreements. Things could probably work out more amicably, especially among friends.”

Scripture may be silent when it comes to specifics of food and exercise, but it’s clear that we’re to treat our bodies as a “temple of the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor. 6:19). That’s suggestive that we shouldn’t, if at all possible, be deliberately consuming chemicals but rather a diet of real food.  

Likewise, the Bible isn’t prescriptive when it comes to the specifics of how families should gather to eat, but we do read that “everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God’s gift to man” (Ecc. 3:13). Luke also writes in Acts that believers were “breaking bread in their homes” and in doing so “received their food with glad and generous hearts” (2:46).

Taken together, families would be well served to eat good food together — a formula that will help reduce the risk of both a spiritual and physical malaise.