Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is Donald Trump's pick to run the Department of Health and Human Services, recently called Trump's diet “poison.” On Saturday, he was photographed on Trump's plane eating McDonald's with the president-elect and his inner circle.
RFK Jr., who says he wants to operate under the slogan Make America Healthy Again (MAHA), criticized Trump's diet on a podcast last week.
“The stuff that he eats is really, like, bad,” he said. “Campaign food is always bad, but the food that goes onto that airplane is, like, just poison. You have a choice between — you don't have the choice, you're either given KFC or Big Macs. That's, like, when you're lucky, and then the rest of the stuff I consider kind of inedible.”
The image circulating Sunday shows Trump and RFK Jr. with Donald Trump Jr., Elon Musk, and House Speaker Mike Johnson. Trump Jr. is happily holding up a fries container. Kennedy has a bottle of Coca-Cola, a box of fries, and what appears to be a hamburger in front of him.
“Make America Healthy Again starts TOMORROW,” Trump Jr. wrote.
Kennedy, 70, is known for his opposition to vaccines. He is not exactly the picture of health, as he famously once had a brain worm. He said the worm “got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died.”
The airplane meal this weekend undoubtedly contained seed oils, which RFK Jr. called “one of the most unhealthy ingredients that we have in foods” on Fox News last month, adding that “they are associated with all kinds of very, very serious illnesses, including body-wide inflammation.” The ingredients have become something of a buzzword among online health influencers — the kind who post themselves eating meals that look like what you would feed a pit bull on its birthday.
Kennedy argues that McDonald's French fries, which are fried in a canola oil blend, would be healthier if they were fried in beef tallow, or rendered beef fat. He is selling hats and bumper stickers that say “make frying oil tallow again.”
Over the weekend, Kennedy wrote on X: “I can't wait to eat McDonalds again! Bring back tallow !”
RFK Jr. is not wrong that Americans eat a lot of unhealthy foods, but according to the American Heart Association, seed oils aren't something you need to avoid. “It's so odd that the internet has gone wild demonizing these things,” said Dr. Christopher Gardner, a nutrition scientist at the Stanford Prevention Research Center. “They are not to be afraid.”
He added: “People are cooking with these oils, not drinking them.” In fact, swapping seed oils, or unsaturated fats, for saturated fats such as beef tallow has been shown to lower the risk of heart disease.
But there's potentially a more pressing reason to avoid McDonald's — a recent E. coli outbreak possibly linked to onions served by the fast food chain has made more than 100 people sick and left one person dead, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ( CDC). McDonald's is now facing multiple lawsuits.
If confirmed, Kennedy will oversee HHS and the CDC.
