He vowed to remove fluoride from the drinking water and railed against fast food so unhealthy that it was “practically poison”. It came as a surprise, then, when Robert F Kennedy Jr was pictured with a McDonald’s at the weekend.
Donald Trump’s pick for health secretary grinned awkwardly as he posed on board Trump Force One indulging in what appeared to be a burger, chips and Coke, the president-elect’s meal of choice.
“POV: walking by the cool kids table,” Margo Martin, Trump’s deputy director of communications for his campaign, wrote on X alongside the photo of Kennedy, Trump, Donald Trump Jr, Elon Musk and Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House, who travelled to New York for an Ultimate Fighting Championship match.
In his new role, Kennedy, a former environmental lawyer, will set the health agenda. He has said he wants to eliminate food additives to reverse the “chronic disease and obesity epidemic.”
Kennedy, who has co-opted the slogan Make America Healthy Again (Maha) as a riff on Trump’s own “Make America Great Again”, claimed in January that he never eats processed food, and that while he used to drink eight or nine Cokes a day, it had been more than eight years since his last.
In a recent podcast interview, Kennedy said the food on Trump’s private jet was “just poison”. “Campaign food is always bad, but the food that goes onto [Trump Force One] is, like, just poison,” he told the podcaster Joe Polish last week.
“You have a choice between … you don’t have the choice, you’re either given KFC or Big Macs. That’s when you’re lucky, and then the rest of the stuff I consider kind of inedible.”
Kennedy told Fox & Friends that he did not have a problem with fast food or McDonald’s, he was just against seed oil. However, McDonald’s cooks its chips in seed oil.
He is also pictured with a Coke which contains fructose corn syrup.
Kennedy was derided on social media, and some people accused him of selling out.
“Not exactly MAHA – eating high processed McDonald’s burgers and large fries and full sugar Coke,” wrote Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist and co-founder of the World Health Network.
A new report has detailed Kennedy’s otherwise strict health regimen of intermittent fasting and drinking only raw, or unpasteurised, milk.
Kennedy, 70, a former Democrat who ran as an independent in the presidential election before dropping out of the race and endorsing Trump, eats his first meal at about noon and his last no later than 7pm.
He says he is on an “anti-ageing protocol” from his doctor that includes testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) to maintain muscle mass. “I don’t take any anabolic steroids or anything like that and the TRT I use is bio-identical to what my body produces,” he said.
Kennedy has also been teetotal for years, after struggling with drug addiction in his youth.
