HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stood before the Heritage Foundation on Monday and framed the federal government's campaign against ultra-processed food in terms rarely heard from a cabinet official: spiritual warfare.

Not a regulatory skirmish. Not a public health initiative. A war, one Kennedy argues, the country cannot afford to lose.

"It's a spiritual warfare. It's a war at scale against cellular activity. It's an assault on our children … it's much worse than cigarettes. Everybody agrees cigarettes are bad. This is much worse. The costs to our society are existential."

The speech laid out a sweeping indictment of the American food system and the medical establishment that Kennedy says has failed to confront it. The numbers he cited land like body blows: America spends $4.3 trillion annually treating chronic diseases. Roughly $1.7 trillion of that — about 40% — goes toward treating diet-induced chronic diseases. Nearly a trillion dollars a year is consumed by metabolic dysfunction alone, driven primarily by diabetes.

And the trend line points in one direction.

A generation in crisis

Kennedy drew a stark generational contrast on diabetes that deserves attention regardless of where you sit on the political spectrum.

"When I was a kid, the average pediatrician would see one case of juvenile diabetes over a 40 or 50-year career. Today, 38% of our teens are diabetic or pre-diabetic. And we know what's causing it."

What's causing it, in Kennedy's telling, isn't mysterious. It isn't genetic drift or bad luck. It's what we feed our kids — 70% of whose diet, he said, now consists of ultra-processed foods. Christian Post shares.

"We need to change what we're feeding these children or we're going to lose our country."

That line will get dismissed as hyperbole by the usual critics. But Kennedy backed it with a national security argument that's harder to wave away: 77% of American children can no longer qualify for military service. Most of that, he said, is diet-related.

A country that cannot field a military from its own young people has a problem that no defense budget can solve.

Doctors who can't doctor

Kennedy reserved particular frustration for the medical profession — not for its practitioners individually, but for the system that trains them.

"Most cases of juvenile diabetes, you can actually lose the diagnosis by simply changing your diet. And … many doctors don't know how to give that kind of advice. Eighty percent of physicians say they don't feel competent to give nutritional advice because they're learning pharmacology in medical school and there's a pill for every ill."

This is the quiet scandal at the center of America's health care crisis. Medical schools spend semesters on pharmacology and minutes on nutrition. The result is a system structurally oriented toward managing disease rather than preventing it — a system where the answer to nearly every chronic condition is a prescription, not a conversation about what's on the plate.

"We're not focusing on what the causes are and how to prevent them. And if we're going to beat this, that's what we have to do."

For decades, the conservative critique of American health care has centered on cost, bureaucracy, and government overreach. Kennedy is adding a layer that should resonate with anyone who believes individuals and families — not pharmaceutical middlemen — should control their own health. You can't make informed choices when the system is designed to keep you medicated rather than educated.

Action, not just rhetoric

Kennedy's Heritage Foundation remarks didn't land in a vacuum. The Trump administration launched its Realfood.gov initiative last month, promoting the 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines. Those guidelines prioritize whole, nutrient-dense foods — proteins, vegetables, fruits, healthy fats — and push Americans to limit or avoid ultra-processed foods, added sugars, and artificial ingredients.

The broader HHS "Make America Healthy Again" campaign aligns with what a global team of public health experts warned just months ago: that growing ultra-processed food consumption is fueling chronic diseases, including mental illnesses, worldwide. Their publication, "Ultra-Processed Foods and Human Health," reinforced what Kennedy has made his central cause.

Even the culture seems to be catching up. The day before Kennedy's speech, former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson declared war against processed foods in a Super Bowl commercial — a signal that the conversation is breaking out of policy circles and into the mainstream.

The real fight

Something is clarifying about Kennedy's language. Washington usually wraps its crusades in the sterile vocabulary of "initiatives" and "guidelines." Kennedy called it what he sees it as — a spiritual battle for the health of American children and the future of the country.

You don't have to share his theological framing to recognize the underlying point. A nation where nearly four in ten teenagers are diabetic or pre-diabetic, where the majority of young people can't serve in uniform, where trillion-dollar medical bills are treated as a cost of doing business — that nation has a problem that transcends politics.

The food industry will push back. The pharmaceutical lobby will push back. The credentialed class that spent decades building a pill-for-every-ill medical system will push back. Kennedy knows this. He chose the word "warfare" deliberately.

The question isn't whether the fight is worth having. It's whether we started it forty years too late.